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Written by
Hanneh Bareham
Hanneh Bareham, a Certified Financial Education Instructor℠, has been a personal finance writer with Bankrate since 2020.
Kelly Suzan Waggoner is a managing editor at Bankrate, where she leads a team of writers and editors dedicated to helping you get the most out of your credit cards — whether to build credit, manage debt or maximize rewards.
Edited by
Liza Carrasquillo
Liza Carrasquillo is an editor on the Bankrate credit cards team who focuses on providing accurate educational content to those at all stages of their credit card journey.
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Keeping a credit card in your wallet can be helpful for a number of reasons. Credit cards are safer to use than debit cards or cash, and they’re one of the easiest ways to build credit. The best credit cards also come with benefits like the chance to earn rewards on everyday purchases, such as groceries or travel.
But when choosing the right credit card for your spending habits, you might not know where to start, especially if you’ve been denied a credit card before. Although the Federal Reserve has been keeping interest rates steady for months and is hinting at lower rates in 2024, many Americans are still recovering from the crunch when the Fed first began hiking interest rates in March of 2022. The Fed’s series of rate hikes had brought on record highs that impacted all areas of borrowing, including credit cards.
According to a Bankrate survey on credit denials, 50 percent of Americans have applied for a new loan or financial product since the Fed started raising rates, with 32 percent of those people applying for new credit cards specifically. About 19 percent of those who applied for new credit cards were denied, making those who apply for credit cards the most likely group to be denied out of all other loan and financial products.
If a credit card application of yours has recently been denied, there are steps you can take to improve your odds of getting approved on your next application, regardless of what the Fed decides to do with their rates.
Here’s what to know about the information a card company or issuer will want from you when you apply for a card, as well as how to best position yourself for card approval:
Your credit score is a three-digit number representing your credit health that issuers use to determine your creditworthiness or how likely you are to repay a loan. It’s important to know your credit score before you submit a credit card application. That’s because while a good credit score can open up the strongest rates and lowest fees, a poor credit score can result in a credit card issuer denying you for a card— in fact, it’s much more likely to happen the lower your credit score is.
Seventy-three percent of those with poor credit who have applied for a loan or financial product since March of 2022 have been denied, while only 29 percent of those who have applied with excellent credit have been denied, according to Bankrate’s credit denial survey. This statistic applies to more lending products than just credit cards, but still shows the importance of applying when your credit score is at its best.
You can request a free copy of your credit report every 12 months from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — but your credit report likely won’t include your actual credit score. While these two tools are easy to mix up, you can think of your credit score as a “grade” and your credit report as the record of activity that went into that grade.
Instead, you can access your credit score for free through many financial institutions. Start with your current bank or credit card issuer. Many major issuers allow you to monitor and track your credit score through an online account or app, such as Capital One’s CreditWise, Chase’s Credit Journey or American Express’s MyCredit Guide. In some cases, you may not need to be a current customer to use the tools.
Knowing your credit score helps you to apply only for cards with credit score requirements you can reasonably meet. For example, if you have a poor credit score, then you don’t want to apply for a card that requires a good to excellent score — instead, you’d want to focus on cards designed for those with bad credit.
The two most popular credit scoring systems are FICO and VantageScore. Each provides scores ranging from 300 to 850, with higher scores indicating stronger credit, though you’ll find differences in how they calculate these scores, and even how financial institutions use them.
