Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte said on Monday that he will not tolerate "abusive monopolies" in the mortgage market, as his agency studies cutting the number of credit reports lenders must buy on each home loan from three to one or two — a cost that lands on homebuyers at closing. "Abusive monopolies will not be allowed to take advantage of consumers anywhere in the mortgage market," Pulte wrote on social media.
Pulte's case is that the current system is a forced purchase. Lenders who want to sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government-backed mortgage giants his agency oversees, and whose boards he chairs — must pull a "tri-merge" report combining the files of all three national credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, together with a credit score, and the price of that mandatory bundle keeps climbing. "Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have been overcharging Americans for far too long," Pulte wrote in September. "We are seriously considering bi-merge, and stronger solutions. We will not allow companies to take advantage of American consumers. No more."
A typical tri-merge report now costs roughly $80 to $100, and lenders commonly pull a borrower's credit more than once during a purchase — at application and again before closing — with the fees passed into the buyer's closing costs. The Mortgage Bankers Association has warned that credit check costs could rise by an average of 40 to 50 percent in 2026, and the lenders' own trade group has attacked the same system Pulte is targeting, saying the bureaus are abusing their government-granted oligopoly by gouging consumers in a system where lenders are required to buy increasingly expensive credit reporting data from each of the three bureaus.
The change under study would let lenders deliver loans using one or two bureau reports instead of all three. "We are studying the usage of just one or two credit reports to bring even more savings than we already have to American consumers," Pulte said this month. It is the latest front in a wider campaign against the tolls built into a mortgage: under Pulte, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have opened their doors to VantageScore 4.0, a rival scoring model owned jointly by the three bureaus, alongside the long-dominant FICO score, and have moved both scores onto a single pricing grid. "We do not care who wins," he said in September. "We just want them to compete — not be a cartel or abusive monopolies." Fair Isaac, the company behind FICO, has seen its share price fall about 60 percent this year as its hold on the $13 trillion mortgage market loosens, and the credit report review comes days after President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to cut the cost of buying and refinancing a home.
The bureaus and their defenders answer that the bill is not theirs alone. The Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents the reporting companies, points to the rising price of the FICO score itself — Fair Isaac's royalty reached $4.95 per score in 2025, its fourth increase since 1989, and the company has launched a direct-to-lender score that bypasses the bureaus altogether. Analysts also warn that a borrower's score can differ substantially from bureau to bureau, so letting lenders pick one or two reports could invite "score shopping" for the most flattering number and leave investors demanding higher interest rates for the added uncertainty: on a $400,000 mortgage, even a one-basis-point rise in the rate costs roughly $1,000 over 30 years — far more than the price of the reports themselves. A previous FHFA leadership explored the same move to fewer reports and backed off after industry pushback over scoring inconsistencies and gaps in data coverage.
No change to the credit report requirement has been announced yet. But the problem Pulte says he is solving is plain: a handful of companies controls a purchase the government itself requires for almost every home loan in America, the buyer has no say in it, and the cost of it keeps rising. Whether cutting the number of reports lenders must buy leaves real money in homebuyers' pockets — or simply moves the cost into the interest rate — is the question his study now has to answer.
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