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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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You can't freeze a credit score.
The scores can and usually will still change even while frozen.
What you can do is enable a security freeze on your credit account, which disallows a credit score from being provided to a bank for assessing your credit worthiness of a loan or credit card or mortgage or afterpay/klarna/microloan type thing.
Freezing your credit is mostly a way of making it so that someone with your personal info can't open a fraudulent account in your name.
There are three companies, credit bureaus, in the US that keep giant permanent records of everyone's credit history.
TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.
Your credit history and other info can differ between all three of them, if there are errors, you have to get them resolved with each one seperately.
There are many different algorithms / scoring models that each of these 3 will use to calculate your actual score.
VantageScore and FICO are the main ones, and the algorithm for each gets updated every few years.
https://www.creditkarma.com/advice/i/vantagescore-vs-fico
So... you can have a FICO or VantageScore from TransUnion, Equifax and Experian.
Different banks or apartments or car loans will all use different scores from different bureaus, and there is usually no way to tell exactly scoring model they'll use before hand... and actually fully applying for anything that requires a 'hard inquiry' into your credit history... that in and of itself will hurt your credit score.
CreditKarma and KikOff will give you your Vantage Scores for free, but not FICO scores.
CreditKarma will only give you TransUnion and Equifax scores, but KikOff also gives you Experian.
Beyond that, other companies have other apps that may give you scores not provided by CK or KO, but you generally have to pay a monthly subscription for that.
...
If this all sounds like a giant confusing mess, ripe for scamming opportunities, that's because it is, and it will only get worse now that Trump and Elon are completely destroying all kinds of financial regulation agencies.