Key Takeaways
- A 600 credit score is fair credit — not great, but enough to qualify at Upgrade, Avant, OneMain, LendingPoint, and Universal Credit.
- Expect APRs in the 18–32% range at 600; on a $10,000 loan over 36 months at 25%, that’s $397 per month and roughly $2,292 in total interest.
- Getting your score to 670 before you apply can cut your rate by 6–10 percentage points — worth delaying the application if your timeline allows.
What a 600 Credit Score Actually Gets You
A 600 sits in the “fair” band of the FICO scale, which runs from 580 to 669. That matters because most personal loan lenders draw their hard cutoffs around 580 to 600, meaning 600 is just above the floor for many of them. You are not a preferred borrower at this score, but you are a borrowable one. Several lenders built their entire model around exactly this part of the credit spectrum.
What you will not get is a competitive rate. The personal loan rates that show up in lender ads, the 8.99% and 10.49% figures, assume scores in the 720-plus range, usually with auto-pay enrolled and sometimes with a co-signer. The footnotes on those pages spell this out, though you have to look for them. At 600, you are realistically shopping in the 18–32% APR range, and the lenders who will approve you are specialists in subprime and near-prime lending rather than the big banks or credit unions that lead with their low advertised rates.
The Lenders Who Will Work With a 600 Score
Upgrade, Avant, OneMain Financial, LendingPoint, and Universal Credit are the names that come up consistently for borrowers in this score range, and they are meaningfully different from each other.
Upgrade approves borrowers starting around 580 and offers loan amounts from $1,000 to $50,000. Their rates at 600 typically land in the 21–29% range, depending on income, debt-to-income ratio, and loan term. They charge origination fees of 1.85% to 9.99%, which are deducted from your disbursement before you see the money, something a lot of borrowers miss until they get the wire. If you borrow $10,000 and the origination fee is 6%, you receive $9,400 but repay the full $10,000 plus interest.
Avant targets what they call the middle-credit segment, with a stated minimum around 580. Loan amounts run $2,000 to $35,000, and APRs advertised on their site range from 9.95% to 35.99%. At 600, expect to be quoted somewhere in the upper half of that range. Avant’s administration fee goes up to 9.99% as well.
OneMain Financial is different from the others because they operate physical branches and offer secured loan options alongside unsecured ones. Securing the loan with a car, for instance, can get you a materially lower rate than you would receive unsecured. OneMain does not publish a minimum credit score, which in practice means they look harder at your full financial picture. Their APR range runs from 18% to 35.99%, and they are one of the few in this space where sitting down with a loan officer at a branch can actually change your outcome.
LendingPoint positions itself specifically for borrowers in the 600–680 range and uses factors beyond the credit score, including income stability and payment history trends. Their rates run from 7.99% to 35.99%; at 600 you are not getting 7.99%, but their willingness to look at trend data rather than just a snapshot score means a borrower who had a hard 2024 but has been clean for 18 months may fare better here than at a lender running a pure score cutoff. Loan amounts go up to $36,500.
Universal Credit, which is part of the Upgrade lending family, is specifically built for borrowers with fair credit and debt consolidation needs. Their APRs run 11.69% to 35.99% and they offer credit education tools built into the account dashboard. The minimum score is around 560, and origination fees are 5.25% to 9.99%.
The best personal loans for a 600 score are not the ones with the prettiest marketing. They are the ones whose qualification criteria you actually meet and whose fees you have fully accounted for before you sign.
Working the Math on a 25% APR
Take a $10,000 personal loan at 25% APR over 36 months. The monthly payment comes out to $397. Over the life of the loan, you pay back $14,292, meaning $4,292 goes to interest. That is not a typo and it is not a worst case. It is the middle of what a 600-score borrower is likely to see in the current rate environment.
Now compare that to what a 670 score might unlock. At 17% APR on the same loan and term, the monthly payment drops to $357 and total interest falls to $2,852. That $40 monthly difference is $1,440 over the loan. Getting your score from 600 to 670 before you apply is, financially, worth about $1,440 on a $10,000 loan. On a $20,000 loan, double it.
That calculation is why I tell people: if you can wait six months, wait. Not always possible, not always the right call, but worth knowing what the delay might actually be worth in dollars.
How to Move From 600 Toward 670
The two fastest levers are credit utilization and payment history. Credit utilization, meaning what percentage of your available revolving credit you are using, has an almost immediate impact on your score when it changes. If you are carrying $4,800 on a card with a $6,000 limit, that 80% utilization is depressing your score significantly. Paying it down to under $1,800 (30% utilization) can move your score 20–40 points in a single billing cycle. Paying it down further, to under 10%, can move it another 10–20.
Payment history is 35% of your FICO score and it builds slowly, but the damage from a 30-day late from two years ago fades over time. If your recent payment history has been clean for 12 months or more, that history is doing more work for you than you might realize. Keep every account current for six months going into an application. One new 30-day late right before you apply does more damage than most people expect.
Do not close old accounts to clean up your credit profile. Closing a card you have had for eight years shortens your average account age and removes available credit, which raises your utilization ratio. Both hurt. Leave the old accounts open.
If you need the loan now rather than in six months, there is still a move worth making. Getting pre-qualified with multiple lenders before you commit lets you compare actual rate offers without a hard inquiry. Lenders do a soft pull for pre-qualification. The hard pull comes when you formally accept an offer, and that is when it shows up on your credit report. Rate shopping three or four lenders through pre-qualification costs you nothing credit-wise.
Federal Options Are Not on the Table Here, But Are Somewhere Else
If any portion of what you are borrowing is for education costs, please exhaust federal student loans first. Federal loans carry fixed rates set by Congress, income-driven repayment options, and forgiveness pathways that no private lender can match. A personal loan at 25% APR for tuition is a poor substitution for a Direct Unsubsidized Loan at 6.53%. That comparison is not close.
For non-education borrowing, personal loans at 600 are a legitimate tool when the math works. Debt consolidation that rolls high-interest credit card balances into a single installment loan at 25% beats carrying revolving debt at 28–29% on the cards, because the installment loan is amortizing and the credit card minimum payment barely touches principal. The discipline imposed by a fixed term with a fixed payment is real.
Just go in with the fee math done, the origination cost factored into your effective rate, and the total interest cost in front of you before you sign anything.
