Credit Records

Another advantage of charge cards is that while they allow consumers to build a credit record by contributing to payment history and depth of credit, they generally won’t impact another important part of the FICO score: the utilization ratio.

According to FICO’s consumer operations manager, the majority of scores used by credit reporting agencies now exclude charge cards when calculating the utilization ratio. (One exception is TransUnion’s credit score, which still factors in charge cards, though the company has indicated it intends to change this.)