What happens to your credit score when you cancel a credit card?

say you are in good staying, never was late. always payed the balance. but you have too many credit cards let's say. so when you cancel that credit card. what happens to your credit score? Does your credit limit you had for that card get erased from the records? after all those years of building the credit limit to help the credit score. what happens to it? and what happens to your score? i'm just curious.|||There are a lot of factors affecting your credit score. Let me just break down what you mentioned and identify whether they would be good / bad for your credit score.





Never late / always paid the balance - Definitely good





Too many credit cards - This, more often than not, lowers your credit score... especially when the total card balances take up too much of the total credit line given to you.





Cancelling a card may or may not help improve your score. Say for example, you paid off that card. When you cancel the card, it will no longer be part of the cards being evaluated, so if you have a high credit limit on that card and high balance on the other cards - your ratio of revolving debt will be higher and that will surely hurt your score.





It may also affect your score when you've had that card for so long since length of credit is a credit score builder.





However, if that's a recent small-balance card with a small credit line anyway, you can just pay off the balance and cut that card in bits without a bit of a worry.|||Yes, it can... but the effects will not be long term.





If you are going to cancel cards you should try to have them all paid off first so your debt to credit limit is not negatively affected.





If you are going to close cards you should try to close newer accounts first... unless there's a particular reason you want to close an older one and keep a newer one.





When you close cards, close one every few months for minimum impact on your credit score.|||if you have other debts, your credit utilization (how much of all available credit you've used) on your credit report, goes higher as the credit limit overall is lower.





The fact that you've had an account with that institution stays there for 7 years, and will show that account is closed due to customer's request.





Your credit score doesn't go down, if anything next time you apply for a loan, with another institution they may give you more $$$ than otherwise.





Hope that helps|||For what ever the reason canceling will lower your score. Just quite using the card, cut it if you don't trust yourself not to use it, but DO NOT cancel the account.|||whatch out for closing credit cards. they affect your credit in a big way.... dont go there!