What credit score do I need to buy a house in Texas?

There is no single number. Each loan program sets an agency minimum, and then the individual lender adds its own stricter overlay — the overlay is what you actually have to meet. Score also prices the loan and the mortgage insurance, not just approval. Get a real preapproval from a lender who pulls credit and reads your income documents.

There are two different minimums, and most articles only tell you about the wrong one

Every page that answers this question with a single number is quoting a program minimum — the floor published by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for conventional loans, by HUD for FHA, or by the VA for VA loans. That floor describes what the agency will insure, guarantee or buy. It does not describe what any actual lender will lend you.

On top of the program floor, individual lenders impose overlays: their own stricter requirements, set by their risk appetite, their investor relationships and their servicing capacity. Overlays vary lender to lender, they change without notice, and they are not published anywhere you can look them up. A borrower who is comfortably above the program floor can still be declined by one lender and approved by the next one on the same file with the same score.

That is why the honest answer is structural rather than numerical. The number that governs your file is the overlay at the specific lender you apply with, on the day you apply. The only way to learn it is to apply.

Score is a price, not just a gate

The second thing the single-number framing hides: credit score is mostly a pricing input. Approval is binary. Cost is a slope.

Score feeds into loan-level pricing adjustments on conventional loans, which move your interest rate or your closing costs up or down. It feeds into what private mortgage insurance costs on a conventional loan with less than twenty percent down, because the mortgage insurance company is separately underwriting you. On an FHA loan the mortgage insurance structure is set by HUD rather than by your score, which is part of why FHA can pencil out better than conventional for a borrower with a thinner file — and worse for a borrower with a strong one.

So "do I qualify" is the wrong first question. The right one is: at my score, across the programs I am eligible for, what does the monthly payment actually come out to? Two loans that both approve can differ meaningfully in what you pay every month for thirty years. A lender can price conventional, FHA and VA side by side on the same file. Ask for that comparison in writing.

Which score the lender is even looking at

Mortgage underwriting does not use the free score in your banking app. Lenders pull a tri-merge report from all three bureaus, each with its own score, and standard practice is to use the middle of the three for a single borrower. On a joint application, the lower borrower's middle score typically governs. That means the number you have been watching is frequently not the number that decides your loan, and it is often not even close.

Pulling credit costs money and takes a few minutes. Any lender who tells you what you qualify for without pulling it is guessing, and you should treat their answer as a guess.

What actually makes a preapproval worth anything

A preapproval is only as strong as the work behind it. There is a wide range under the same word:

A prequalification is a conversation. Someone typed your stated income and stated debts into a calculator. It proves nothing.
A preapproval should mean credit has been pulled and the loan officer has read pay stubs, W-2s or tax returns, and asset statements, and has run the file through automated underwriting.
An underwritten preapproval means a human underwriter has reviewed the file and issued conditions. This is the strongest thing a buyer can walk in with short of a cash offer.

The difference matters most on the days it matters most. When a seller is holding two offers, the financing behind them is the tiebreaker, and a letter that says "subject to verification of all information" does not read the same as one from a lender who can say on the phone that the file has cleared underwriting.

What the seller's side is actually reading

In a Texas contract, a buyer whose purchase depends on getting a mortgage uses the Third Party Financing Addendum, TREC form 40-11, effective 01/03/2025 (TREC contract forms). It is a promulgated form — TREC writes it, license holders are required to use it, and license holders may not draft their own contract language.

That addendum, plus the preapproval letter attached to the offer, is what the listing side evaluates when it weighs your offer against another one. Listing agents call lenders. The answer they get — whether the loan officer picks up, whether they know the file, whether they will speak to the underwriting status — moves offers. A strong file communicated badly loses to a weaker file communicated well more often than buyers expect.

Credit is a moving target, and mid-contract is the worst time to move it

Your file gets re-verified before closing. Common ways buyers damage their own deal after going under contract:

Financing furniture or appliances for the new house.
Opening a store card for the discount at checkout.
Buying or leasing a vehicle.
Moving money between accounts without a paper trail, which creates unsourced deposits the underwriter has to chase.
Paying off and closing an old account, which can shorten average account age.
Changing jobs, changing from salary to commission, or going from W-2 to 1099.

None of these are hypothetical. All of them have killed loans in the last week before closing. The rule from contract to funding is boring on purpose: change nothing, buy nothing, move nothing, tell the lender first.

One Texas-specific thing to know now, not later

If you ever plan to pull equity out of the home once you own it, Texas is different from most states. A cash-out refinance or home equity loan on a Texas homestead is governed by the Texas Constitution, Section 50(a)(6), which caps total borrowing against the homestead at 80% of fair market value, requires a 12-day waiting period before closing, caps most fees at 2% of loan principal (excluding the appraisal, survey, title insurance premium and title search), is generally non-recourse, and allows only one such loan at a time with 12 months between home equity closings (Texas cash-out rules summarized).

That matters at purchase because the equity cushion you will need later is set by law, not by what a lender is willing to do. Investment property in Texas is not subject to 50(a)(6). A lender can walk you through how it applies to your plans.

Who to ask

Qualification, rates, programs, overlays and what your specific score prices out to are lender questions, and the answer is file-specific. Credit report errors are disputed with the bureaus, and a reputable lender will tell you whether a rapid rescore is worth attempting on your file or whether it is a waste of thirty days. How the contract's financing terms should be written for your situation is a question for your agent and, where the language itself is at issue, a Texas real estate attorney.

Questions about a specific property?

Call or text 830-446-3847 · Email heath.shepard@kw.com

This page explains how mortgage credit requirements are structured. It is not lending advice or legal advice. Qualification, pricing and program eligibility are determined by a licensed lender reviewing your actual file.