It&#x27;s not about <i>how much</i> you pay off each month at all. The banks don&#x27;t calculate credit scores—the credit reporting agencies do. And the credit-reporting agencies don&#x27;t think that way.<p>The thing about credit event streams is that they&#x27;re very low-detail: basically they amount to, for each credit instrument you have, a series of {pay-period, code} pairs with nine possible codes, R1-R9. Your score is entirely calculated† by taking (a seven-year sliding window of) those event-codes and applying weights to them. R1, the most-positively-weighted event, just means &quot;paid on time this month.&quot;<p>The thing you want to do to build good credit quickly, is to generate <i>as many R1 events as you can</i>. You <i>can</i> carry some of your debt on a card to &quot;stretch&quot; one large charge into multiple R1 events... but a more efficient strategy (that doesn&#x27;t involve paying any interest) is to simply have several cards, use them all for at least one trifling thing each month, and then pay them <i>all</i> off each month. Three cards you paid off $5 charges on is three R1s, and counts for <i>just as much</i> as one $500 charge you paid in three instalments (also three R1s.)<p>If you want to dig in and see exactly how much information a CRA will give you, here&#x27;s a Ruby implementation of the Experian Connect API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ehutzelman&#x2F;experian" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ehutzelman&#x2F;experian</a><p>---<p>† Well, okay, there&#x27;s also two other things:<p>1. a positively-weighted factor for how much unused credit each instrument holds each month. Which usually translates to &quot;you get punished for carrying an 80%+ balance on a credit card.&quot; The key with this one is that—all else being equal—it&#x27;s better to have cards with higher credit limits, because then you&#x27;re not using as much of each instrument&#x27;s capacity, and that reflects better on you.<p>2. a negatively-weighted factor for any &quot;hard inquiries&quot; that the credit-reporting agency had to respond to within some time window. Each time you apply for a credit instrument and the loaning institution asks the reporting agency to calculate your credit score <i>for the purpose of determining credit eligibility</i>, that&#x27;s a &quot;hard inquiry&quot; event. (You can think of these as their own credit event on a &quot;meta&quot; instrument held by the reporting agency itself.) Unlike normal credit instruments, there are no industry standards on how to set the weights or time-window for the effects of &quot;hard inquiries&quot;, but the windows are <i>usually</i> short (~6 months), AFAIK. All else being equal, don&#x27;t quickly, repeatedly apply for credit: each successive loaning institution will see a lower score. (And note the &quot;for the purpose of determining credit eligibility&quot; bit. There&#x27;s another kind of event, a &quot;soft inquiry&quot;, that happens when you—or some third-party on your behalf—just asks the reporting agency for your credit score in order to know it, or background-check you, or whatever else. I&#x27;m pretty sure none of the big three CRAs in the US give any weight to a &quot;soft inquiry&quot; event.)