What Does "Average Age of Accounts" Mean for Your Score?
Average age of accounts is one of those factors that moves even when nothing about existing accounts has changed — the arrival of something new is enough to shift it.
The short answer
Average age of accounts is calculated by adding together the age, usually in months, of every open account on a credit file and dividing by the total number of open accounts. It’s part of how length of credit history is calculated within a scoring model that also weighs the other factors described in what makes up a credit score, and it tends to drop whenever a new account is added, since a brand-new account starts at an age of essentially zero.
A simple example
Picture a hypothetical file with three open accounts: one that’s 12 years old, one that’s 6 years old, and one that’s 2 years old. The average age comes out to about 6.7 years. Now imagine a fourth account is opened today. The average drops to roughly 5 years, even though none of the original three accounts changed at all. The new account didn’t just add to the file — it diluted the average across everything already there.
The size of the dip generally depends on how many accounts already existed before the new one arrived. Adding a fourth account to a file that already had three well-aged accounts pulls the average down less, proportionally, than adding a second account to a file that only ever had one. A thinner file, in other words, tends to feel the arrival of something new more sharply than a thicker one.
Why this surprises people
It’s easy to assume that adding a new account, especially one that gets paid on time from day one, can only help a credit file. In some respects that’s true — it can diversify credit mix and add available credit — but the average-age effect works in the opposite direction, at least temporarily. The dip isn’t necessarily large, and it tends to fade as the new account ages alongside the others, but it explains why a score can dip slightly right after opening something new even when payments are handled perfectly.
What moves the number back up
Average age recovers gradually, simply through the passage of time, as every account — including the new one — gets a year older together. There’s no shortcut that speeds this up:
- Time is the only real lever. No payment behavior or balance change accelerates how quickly average age climbs back.
- Closing an account doesn’t necessarily help. Depending on how a scoring model treats closed accounts, closing an old card can sometimes remove a long-held account from the average entirely, which can lower it rather than raise it.
- Fewer, well-spaced accounts tend to keep the average steadier than frequently opening and closing accounts over the same period.
A practical habit
Because average age of accounts responds to timing more than to any single choice, it helps to think of new applications as something to space out rather than something to avoid altogether. A new account opened occasionally, and then left alone to age, has a much smaller lasting effect on the average than a cluster of new accounts opened in a short window.