Does having a car loan affect getting a credit card?
Sophia Koch
Updated on February 18, 2026
An auto loan will NOT impact your credit utilization The good news is that only revolving credit accounts, such as credit cards, impact credit utilization, which accounts for 30% of your credit score.
Why is a credit card worse than a loan?
Credit cards generally have higher interest rates than personal loans. If you carry a large balance, interest charges can add up quickly. Credit cards typically charge late fees; many charge annual fees as well. If you make a late payment or miss a payment, the card issuer may raise your interest rate.
Are auto loans easier to get now?
Credit cards, auto loans and other personal loans are all getting easier to come by, more than a year into a pandemic that spooked lenders and caused them to tighten lending standards significantly. About 19% of banks loosened auto underwriting, while less than 2% tightened standards.
Does financing a car make your credit better?
Ultimately, a car loan does not build credit; however, you can use the car loan to help increase your score. It increases your credit history. Provided you don’t have any late or missed payments, this increase can help build your score.
Why is it so easy to get an auto loan?
The key to auto loans’ wide availability is due to one simple reality of cars — they can be repossessed. “Lenders are, in general, more comfortable about being able to recover their money should there be a problem because they can reposess the vehicle,” Ikemura says.
Is it hard to get accepted for a car loan?
Often, getting accepted for car financing means locating the right lender for the job. In the case of many bad credit or no credit borrowers, it may be hard to get approved by a credit union, bank, or automaker’s lending arm. However, there are dealerships all over the country with special finance lending options.
What makes it harder to get a credit card?
If you’ve been 30 or more days late on a credit card payment recently, you could have a harder time getting approved for a credit card, even if the late payment didn’t cause a big drop in your credit score. Late payments indicate that you’re a risky borrower.
Which is better a credit card or a loan?
If you don’t trust yourself to pay down your credit card in time, there’s always the option of forfeiting the 0% offer in favour of just one low interest rate. Barclaycard Simplicity, for example, charges a straight-forward annual percentage rate of 6.8% – lower than the leading loan rates.
What happens to your credit when you get a car loan?
Your cosigner doesn’t get any rights to your vehicle, but their credit score, along with yours, can be positively or negatively affected based on how you handle the loan. Another option for borrowers is going with a subprime lender through a dealer’s special finance department.