Compare loans, side by side.

What credit score do you actually need for a personal loan?

The honest answer is that there's no universal cutoff — there's a cutoff per lender. LightStream wants 700+ and prices accordingly. Discover and Citi start at 660. Best Egg goes to 640. LendingClub takes scores down to 600. Upstart will look at applicants with credit as low as 620 but weighs education and employment heavily. OneMain Financial does not publish a minimum at all and underwrites mainly on income and collateral. Anywhere below the mid-600s, expect APRs to climb steeply — often into the 25–35.99% range, where the math on the loan stops making sense for almost any purpose other than consolidating credit-card debt that's already higher. A useful rule: if a personal loan's APR is higher than what's already sitting on a card, the loan isn't actually solving anything. Estimates only — final terms are set by the partner.

Origination fees: the hidden APR

An origination fee is a one-time charge, usually 1–10% of the loan amount, that gets deducted from the funded balance. Borrow $20,000 with a 6% origination fee and only $18,800 hits the bank account — but the full $20,000 is still owed back with interest. That's why APR is the right number to compare across lenders, not the headline interest rate. APR is required by federal Truth in Lending rules to bake the origination fee back into the cost. LightStream and Discover advertise no origination fee, which is part of why their effective costs run lower than competitors with similar headline rates. Best Egg, LendingClub and Upstart can charge origination fees up to 8–9.99%, depending on the borrower's profile. The fee shows up in pre-qualification before any commitment is made.

Should a co-signer enter the picture?

A co-signer is the strongest single move available to an applicant whose credit is borderline. The co-signer's credit and income are added to the application, which usually drops the APR by several percentage points and unlocks loan amounts that would otherwise be capped. The trade-off is real: the co-signer is fully on the hook for missed payments, the loan appears on the co-signer's credit report, and any default damages two scores instead of one. Not every lender on this page accepts co-signers. SoFi, LightStream and LendingClub allow them; Discover, OneMain and Best Egg generally do not. A co-signer also has no easy exit — most personal-loan contracts don't include co-signer release clauses, so the only way out is refinancing the loan in the borrower's sole name once their credit improves.

When debt consolidation makes sense — and when it backfires

Consolidating credit-card debt into a fixed-rate personal loan can be a meaningful upgrade. A typical credit card sits at 22–28% variable APR; a borrower with decent credit can usually find a personal loan in the 9–15% range, with a fixed payment and a defined payoff date. The math works. The failure mode is behavioral: the cards get paid off, the credit limit stays open, and twelve months later the cards are full again on top of the new loan payment. The only consolidations that actually work are the ones paired with closing or freezing the underlying cards. Consolidation also doesn't help when the underlying problem is income, not interest rate — stretching $30,000 in debt across seven years lowers the monthly payment but raises the total cost. Run the total-interest math, not just the monthly delta, before signing.

Fixed-rate versus variable-rate loans

Almost every personal loan from the lenders on this page is fixed-rate — the APR locks at funding and the monthly payment doesn't move for the life of the loan. That predictability is the main selling point of personal loans versus credit cards or HELOCs, both of which carry variable rates that drift with the federal funds rate. A few personal-loan products do offer variable APR, usually in exchange for a lower starting rate. The math gets dangerous quickly: a 1.5-point Fed move can add hundreds of dollars over a five-year term. Unless there's a clear plan to pay the loan off inside 12–18 months, the fixed-rate version is almost always the better trade. The published APR ranges in the table above are all for fixed-rate products.

The order of operations for shopping

The right sequence is: pre-qualify with three to five lenders using soft pulls, compare APR (not headline rate) and total cost over the term, then formally apply with the one or two best fits. Hard pulls for the same loan type cluster within a 14-day window on most credit-scoring models, so applying to two finalists in the same week is treated as a single inquiry. Skip the temptation to apply to ten lenders in parallel — that pattern reads as financial distress to underwriting models and can actually lower approval odds. And remember the structural point: Cankicker Finance is not a lender. The platform compares published partner data so the trade-offs sit in front of the applicant — the partner makes the credit decision, sets the rate, funds the loan and handles the servicing relationship from there.