Pick a number. Write it down. Put it in the listing. Then leave it alone for a year.
That sequence is worth more than the number itself, and landlords spend their energy backwards: agonizing over whether the floor should be 650 or 680, and then moving it for the applicant in front of them. A floor that moves is not a floor. It is a preference with a number attached, and it is unusable as a defense the moment anyone asks why one applicant cleared it and another did not.
Here is how to arrive at a number you can actually keep.
What a score is, and how many of them a person has
The CFPB defines a credit score as a prediction of credit behavior, such as how likely a person is to pay a loan back on time, built from the information in their credit reports. Most scores fall in a range of 300 to 850.
The part that changes how you should use it: nobody has one score. Different scoring models, different bureaus, and different dates produce different numbers for the same person. The CFPB says so directly.
So a cutoff of 680 is a rough instrument, not a precise one. An applicant who scores 672 on the model your provider uses might score 690 somewhere else, and the difference is not a fact about the applicant. Treat the number as a band, and expect your criteria to be doing real work elsewhere. The signals that predict tenancy better than a score covers where that work happens.
How to set the floor for your market
Three inputs, in order.
What your unit competes with. A class-C unit in a soft market and a renovated unit in a tight one do not get the same applicant pool, and a floor that no applicant in your market clears is a vacancy policy rather than a screening policy.
What the score is protecting against. Be specific. If the concern is unpaid rent at move-out, the deposit and the income multiple are already carrying most of that. The score adds information about financial pressure, which is real but partial.
What you will do about the ones just under. Decide this now, not later. Either the floor is hard, or there is a written second look with defined compensating factors: a co-signer, a longer verified rental history, or a larger deposit where your state allows one. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is having a hard floor on paper and a soft one in practice.
Wherever you land, the number is doing less work than you think. What makes a floor hold up is the second half of the policy: a written answer for the applicants who fall just under it.
Applicants with no score at all
Plenty of good tenants have thin files or none. Recent immigrants, young renters who have never carried credit, people who have paid cash their whole adult lives.
A criteria page with no answer for them produces improvisation, and improvisation is where fair housing complaints come from. A blanket rule that no score means no tenancy also invites the discriminatory effect analysis at 24 C.F.R. § 100.500, which asks whether a neutral practice produces a disparate impact, whether it is necessary to a substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interest, and whether a less discriminatory alternative would serve that interest.
Write the alternative instead. Something like: an applicant with no score satisfies the credit criterion with twelve months of verified on-time rent payments from a landlord you can reach, plus bank statements showing the income. That is a real standard, it measures the same risk, and it applies to everybody who arrives in that situation.
The subsidy rule, where it applies
If an applicant has a government rent subsidy, some states change the arithmetic. California requires the income standard to be based on the portion of the rent the tenant actually pays rather than the full rent (Cal. Gov. Code § 12955(o)).
That is an income rule rather than a credit rule, but it lands in the same place: a screening page that applies one formula to everyone without knowing the local exceptions will apply it wrong. Check your state’s list before you print the criteria. How to verify income works through the documents.
Publish the number
Put the floor in the listing text and on the application. Three things happen.
Applicants who cannot clear it stop applying, which saves them a fee and saves you the work. Applicants who can clear it arrive already knowing the standard is real. And the number is now documented as having existed before any particular applicant did, which is the entire evidentiary point.
A blank rental application with your criteria attached is the simplest way to do this consistently.
When the score drives the decision, more paperwork follows
Deny an applicant, or impose worse terms, based even partly on a consumer report, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires an adverse action notice. Use a credit score in that decision and additional obligations attach: the applicant gets the numerical score you used, its source, the date, the range of possible scores, and the key factors that adversely affected it.
Most agencies supply those factors on the report itself. Copying them into the notice is the entire additional task, and it is the piece most often left out. Adverse action notices has the full contents list.
Review the number once a year, on a date
Not when a borderline applicant is standing in front of you. Put it on the calendar, look at the applicant pool you actually got, and adjust for everybody going forward with a new date on the page.
That is the whole discipline. A number, in writing, with a written exception path, reviewed on a schedule and never for a person. Keeping the standard next to the decision it produced is how it stays true a year later, when what you remember and what you did have started to drift apart.
This is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and local ordinances vary. Confirm current requirements with your city, county, or an attorney before you act.