This article is for general educational purposes and is not lending, legal, or financial advice; all score ranges and pricing reflect 2025–2026 figures verified against the issuing bureaus and the U.S. Small Business Administration, and vendor pricing and lender cutoffs change frequently.
TL;DR — Quick Verdict
- Four scores drive business lending decisions: Dun & Bradstreet’s PAYDEX (1–100), Experian’s Intelliscore Plus (1–100), Equifax’s Business Credit Risk Score (101–992), and the FICO SBSS (0–300) — each on a different scale, so a “good” number in one is meaningless in another.
- A PAYDEX of 80 means you pay on the exact due date; anything above 80 means you pay early. Below 50 signals high risk, per Dun & Bradstreet.
- You can monitor all three commercial bureaus for $0 by pairing Nav’s free tier with D&B CreditSignal, or pay $39–$199 per year for full numeric reports and detailed tradelines.
- The FICO SBSS minimum of 165 that gated SBA 7(a) Small Loans was sunset as a mandate on March 1, 2026 — lenders now set their own cutoffs, but most still screen you against it.
- Pull reports from all three bureaus before any major financing application; each holds different tradelines, and a single missing vendor can drop your file to “no score.”
A single tax lien can strip 50 to 100 points off your Equifax business score, dragging a healthy file straight into the high-risk band — and most owners never see it coming because they’ve never pulled the report. Business credit runs on a system almost nobody explains: four separate scores, four incompatible scales, and three bureaus (Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Equifax) that each hold a different slice of your payment history. A lender pulling Experian’s Intelliscore Plus sees a different picture than one pulling your D&B PAYDEX, and neither number translates to the other. According to Dun & Bradstreet, its PAYDEX score is calculated almost entirely from one variable — whether you pay vendors on time — while Experian folds in more than 800 data points. This guide decodes every score you’ll encounter, shows exactly what each report costs (from free to $199 a year), and gives you the risk-band math to interpret your own file before a lender does it for you.
The Four Scores That Decide Whether You Get Funded
Business credit has no single “score” the way personal credit leans on FICO. Instead, four models compete, and the one that matters depends entirely on who’s pulling it. Vendors and suppliers lean on D&B’s PAYDEX. Business card issuers favor Experian’s Intelliscore Plus. SBA lenders historically ran everyone through the FICO SBSS first.
Here’s the trap: the scales don’t align. A PAYDEX of 80 is excellent. An Equifax Business Credit Risk Score of 80 barely exists on a scale that runs to 992. Reading your report means knowing which ruler you’re holding.
One structural detail reshapes everything below: the SBSS blends your personal consumer credit with business data, which is why a strong personal FICO can rescue a thin business file — and why building business credit from zero doesn’t fully insulate you from your own credit history.
Reading the PAYDEX Score: Why 80 Is the Number That Matters
Dun & Bradstreet built the PAYDEX in the 1980s to standardize one question: does this business pay on time? The score runs 1 to 100 and is dollar-weighted, meaning a late payment on a $50,000 invoice hurts far more than a slow $500 bill.
The risk bands are precise. Per Dun & Bradstreet, 80 to 100 signals low risk, 50 to 79 moderate risk, and 0 to 49 high risk. But the granularity inside the “good” range is what most owners miss: a score of exactly 80 means you pay on the day invoices come due. Every point above 80 means you’re paying early. To hit an 80, expect roughly 45 to 90 days of consistent on-time reporting across active tradelines.
Consider a landscaping supplier deciding whether to extend you Net 30 terms on a $12,000 order. At a PAYDEX of 82, they see a business that pays as agreed and approve the terms. At 68 — the moderate band — they may demand payment on delivery, tying up cash you needed for payroll. That single band shift changes your working capital position without a dollar of your revenue changing. Understanding how vendor terms interact with your broader borrowing options, from a line of credit versus a term loan, is what turns a score into a strategy.
One catch: PAYDEX only exists if vendors report. D&B may factor trade references from its partner network, but if none of your suppliers report, your file stays blank — no score at all, which many lenders treat as worse than a mediocre one.
Intelliscore Plus vs. PAYDEX: Which Should You Watch?
Experian’s Intelliscore Plus and D&B’s PAYDEX both top out at 100, which fools owners into treating them as interchangeable. They aren’t. PAYDEX asks one question about payment speed. Intelliscore Plus runs your file through more than 800 variables — payment history, credit utilization, public records, business demographics, and often the owner’s personal credit — to predict serious delinquency over the next 12 months.
Experian considers 76 to 100 its low-risk tier. That means a business could hold an 82 PAYDEX (excellent) and a 68 Intelliscore (still elevated risk) simultaneously, because a lien or high utilization the PAYDEX ignores drags the Intelliscore down. Note that Experian’s newer Intelliscore Plus V3 also offers a 300–850 scale to mirror consumer scoring, though the 1–100 model remains the common reference point.
Verdict
Watch both, but prioritize based on your goal. If you’re seeking trade credit and vendor terms, the PAYDEX is your lever — it’s the number suppliers check. If you’re applying for a business card, equipment loan, or credit line, the Intelliscore Plus carries more weight because it captures the broader risk picture lenders price against. For most owners pursuing financing in 2026, Intelliscore Plus is the score to defend first, since a single derogatory public record can sink it while leaving your PAYDEX untouched.
The practical move: never assume a strong score at one bureau means a strong file everywhere. This mismatch is exactly why pulling all three reports before you apply matters, a discipline that also shapes decisions around business versus personal card liability.
What It Costs to Actually See Your Reports
Pricing spans from free to four figures, and the gap between tiers is mostly about numeric detail versus directional alerts. Free tools tell you the score moved; paid reports tell you the exact number and why.
The zero-dollar strategy works: pairing Nav’s free dashboard with D&B CreditSignal gives you directional coverage across all three bureaus for nothing. The trade-off is you get letter grades and “score changed” alerts rather than the exact three-digit numbers a lender sees. Before a real financing application — an SBA loan, an equipment purchase, or a credit line — spring for at least one full numeric report so you can dispute errors before underwriting catches them.
The FICO SBSS and the 2026 Rule Change Most Owners Missed
For nearly two decades, one number gated SBA 7(a) Small Loans: the FICO SBSS, which runs 0 to 300 and blends the owners’ personal consumer credit with business bureau data. Miss the cutoff and your application often stalled before it started.
Then the rules shifted — twice. In June 2025, the SBA raised the minimum prescreen score from 155 to 165 and simultaneously lowered the maximum Small Loan amount from $500,000 to $350,000. Then, effective March 1, 2026, the SBA sunset the SBSS prescreening mandate entirely. Per SBA guidance, lenders may now use their own approved credit models, provided the model can’t rely solely on the owner’s personal consumer score. The agency added a new floor in its place: a minimum 1.1x debt service coverage ratio on all 7(a) Small Loans.
What this means for reading your file: the SBSS still matters, just not as a hard gate. Many lenders continue screening applicants against it by choice, given its long SBA track record. But you generally can’t see your own SBSS — it’s sold only to FICO’s lender customers — so the practical lever is the inputs feeding it: your personal FICO and your business bureau data. Owners weighing an SBA 7(a) loan’s rates and eligibility or comparing an SBA microloan against a community bank loan should treat strong personal credit as non-negotiable, since it drives the score they can’t directly monitor.
Equifax’s Three Scores and the Public-Record Penalty
Equifax splits business credit into three numbers, and confusing them is a common reading error. The headline Business Credit Risk Score runs 101 to 992 and predicts 90-plus-day delinquency; per Equifax, scores above 700 typically read as low risk. Separately, the Payment Index (1–100) tracks pure payment timing, where 90 to 100 means on-time or early. The third, the Business Failure Score (roughly 1,000 to 1,880), predicts outright closure.
Public records carry outsized weight here. A single civil judgment or tax lien can shave 50 to 100 points off the Equifax risk score, and paying it off doesn’t instantly reverse the damage — the derogatory mark lingers. This is why owners with clean payment histories sometimes get blindsided: a UCC filing or a forgotten state lien tanks the score independent of how they pay vendors.
The correct reading habit is to check each Equifax score against its own scale, not a mental average. A Payment Index of 92 next to a Risk Score of 540 isn’t contradictory — it says you pay on time but carry a public-record or thin-file problem. Catching that distinction early, before you apply for financing that requires a personal guarantee and its risk exposure, is the difference between fixing a fixable file and getting a denial you didn’t see coming.
What Most People Get Wrong When Reading Business Credit
Three misreadings cost owners money and approvals repeatedly:
Mistake 1: Treating one bureau’s score as “the” score. The consequence is applying to a lender who pulls Equifax while you’ve only monitored your PAYDEX, walking in blind to a lien on your Equifax file. The correct action is pulling all three bureau reports before any financing application, because each holds different tradelines and a lender may use any of them.
Mistake 2: Assuming a blank file is neutral. No score is often treated as higher risk than a middling one. A business with zero reporting vendors has nothing for a lender to price against. The fix is deliberately opening reporting tradelines — a process central to building business credit from zero — so a score generates at all.
Mistake 3: Ignoring the personal-credit link. Owners assume business scores are fully separate. But the SBSS and, often, the Intelliscore fold in the owner’s personal credit, so a personal delinquency can suppress a business approval. The correct action is protecting personal credit as rigorously as business credit, especially when a startup loan’s requirements lean heavily on the founder’s profile.
A fourth quieter error: never disputing. Business credit reports carry no federal Fair Credit Reporting Act dispute rights identical to personal credit, but the bureaus still accept corrections. An uncontested error on a public record can quietly cost you a rate tier for years.
Is Paid Monitoring Worth It? Who Should Pay and Who Shouldn’t
The math is conditional, not universal. If your business isn’t currently seeking credit and has a stable vendor base, the free Nav-plus-CreditSignal combination is genuinely sufficient — you’ll catch a score drop or a fraudulent inquiry through directional alerts, which is most of the monitoring value.
Pay for full numeric reports if any of these apply: you’re within six months of a significant financing application, you’ve had a lien or judgment in the past two years, or you’re actively negotiating vendor terms where a supplier will pull your exact PAYDEX. In those cases, the $39 to $199 spend buys you the actual numbers and tradeline detail needed to fix errors before a lender prices them into your rate. On a $150,000 loan, a single rate tier can mean thousands in interest — paid monitoring pays for itself many times over if it catches one correctable error.
Skip the premium multi-business plans (some run around $1,495 a year for 30-business access) unless you’re underwriting other companies or managing a portfolio. For a single owner-operator, that tier is overkill. The right choice scales with how close you are to borrowing and how messy your public-record history is — the same conditional logic that governs whether alternatives like revenue-based financing’s cost structure or invoice factoring’s effective rate fit your situation better than a traditional loan.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I check my business credit score for free?
Yes. Nav offers a free tier showing summary grades and letter ratings from Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Equifax in one dashboard. Dun & Bradstreet’s CreditSignal is also free, giving 14 days of detailed PAYDEX and risk-score data, then change alerts afterward. Combining both covers all three bureaus at $0, though you get directional grades rather than the exact numeric scores a lender sees.
Is a PAYDEX score of 80 good?
Yes — 80 is the threshold Dun & Bradstreet considers low risk, and it means your business pays invoices on the exact day they’re due. Scores of 80 to 100 fall in the low-risk band, with anything above 80 indicating early payment. Most lenders and trade creditors look for a minimum around 75 to 80. Below 50 signals high delinquency risk to vendors and lenders.
Do I still need a FICO SBSS score for an SBA loan in 2026?
Not as a hard requirement. Effective March 1, 2026, the SBA sunset its mandate that lenders prescreen 7(a) Small Loan applicants against the FICO SBSS (minimum 165). Lenders may now use their own approved credit models plus a new 1.1x debt service coverage ratio floor. However, many lenders still use the SBSS by choice, so strong personal and business credit remain essential.
Why is my score different at each bureau?
Because each bureau holds different data and uses a different scale. Dun & Bradstreet’s PAYDEX (1–100) tracks only vendor payment timing, Experian’s Intelliscore Plus (1–100) weighs 800-plus variables, and Equifax’s Business Credit Risk Score runs 101–992. A vendor reporting to D&B but not Equifax means your files genuinely differ. Pull all three before any major financing application.
How We Researched This Article
This guide draws exclusively on primary and issuer-level sources for every score range, threshold, and price. Score-scale figures come directly from the bureaus that own them: the PAYDEX range and risk bands from Dun & Bradstreet, the Intelliscore Plus scale and variable count from Experian’s business credit resources, and the Equifax Business Credit Risk Score, Payment Index, and Business Failure Score ranges from Equifax’s published documentation.
FICO SBSS figures — the 0–300 range, the June 2025 increase of the minimum from 155 to 165, the reduction of the maximum Small Loan from $500,000 to $350,000, and the March 1, 2026 sunset of the prescreening mandate — were verified against the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 7(a) loan program guidance and cross-checked against lender and industry reporting for the effective dates. Pricing for monitoring services was confirmed against each provider’s current published rates and corroborated through Bankrate’s reporting on report costs.
Where sources presented the same figure across multiple secondary aggregators, we deferred to the issuing institution’s own scale. Score ranges are measured facts published by the bureaus; the risk-band interpretations and cost-of-error scenarios are illustrative models, not guarantees of any specific lender’s decision, since underwriting criteria vary by institution. Vendor pricing and lender cutoffs change frequently and should be reconfirmed at the source before purchase. This research was last conducted in July 2026. All figures were verified against named primary sources before publication.