D&B Business Credit Scores
Four measures, four different questions. PAYDEX asks how you paid. The Delinquency Predictor asks whether you will pay late. The Failure Score asks whether you will still exist. The D&B Rating asks how big you are and whether you showed your books.
Company profile
Start from a profile, then adjust.
Trade payment experiences
PAYDEX is dollar-weighted. A $50,000 invoice paid late moves the score far more than a $200 one. D&B needs at least three reported experiences before it will produce a score at all.
Company facts
Size, age and whether you have filed financials drive the Rating directly, and feed the two predictive scores.
Public records & trend
Liens, judgments and suits weigh heavily on both predictive scores — the Failure Score especially, since it is asking whether creditors are already circling.
The four measures
Same company, four different questions.
How the PAYDEX was reached
Rating classification
Net worth sets the letter-number. Your row is highlighted.
| Code | Tangible net worth |
|---|
What would move these
Ranked by effect on this profile.
Reading the four scores
PAYDEX — how you actually paid
A 1–100 index of past payment performance, built from reported trade experiences and weighted by dollar value. The anchor points are fixed and worth memorising: 80 means paying exactly on terms, 90 is around 20 days early, 100 is about 30 days early. Below the line, 70 is roughly 15 days beyond terms, 50 is about 30 days late. D&B groups these into three risk bands — 80–100 low risk, 50–79 moderate, 0–49 high.
Two structural facts matter more than the number. It is backward-looking — it describes behaviour, it does not predict. And it only exists if suppliers report; a business paying flawlessly whose vendors never furnish data has no PAYDEX at all. Chasing trade references is therefore not gaming the system, it is the system.
Delinquency Predictor Score — whether you will pay late
Scored 101–670, higher is better, and grouped into risk classes 1–5. Class 1 (roughly 580–670) is the lowest risk of severe delinquency in the next 12 months; class 5 (roughly 101–452) carries the highest. This is the score formerly known as the Commercial Credit Score — D&B renamed it, and older documentation still uses the previous name.
Where PAYDEX reports history, this is a forecast: it blends payment behaviour with firmographics, public records and financial data to answer a forward question.
Failure Score — whether you will still exist
Scored 1001–1875, higher is better, with 1875 the lowest probability of failure. Also expressed as a class 1–5 and a percentile 1–100. Formerly the Financial Stress Score, it predicts the likelihood that a business will seek legal relief from creditors or cease operations without paying creditors in full over the next 12 months.
The distinction from the Delinquency Predictor is the one people most often miss. A company can be slow and solvent, or prompt and failing. Late payment is a behaviour; failure is an outcome. Reading only one of the two gives you half a counterparty.
D&B Rating — how big you are, and whether you opened the books
Two parts joined together. The Rating Classification is a size band from tangible net worth: 5A at the top ($50 million and over) down to HH (under $5,000). The Composite Credit Appraisal is a 1–4 judgement of overall creditworthiness, 1 being best, drawn from payment history, financials, public records and years in operation.
The rule that catches people out: the classification is only assigned if you have filed a current financial statement with D&B. Without one you get an employee-based alternative — 1R for 10 or more employees, 2R for 1–9 — and, critically, the best Composite Credit Appraisal you can achieve is 2. A flawless company that never files accounts is capped. Filing is the single highest-leverage action available on this particular measure, and it costs nothing but disclosure.
How this model works
PAYDEX is computed properly: each trade line is weighted by its dollar amount, the weighted-average days beyond terms is mapped through D&B's published anchor points, and the working is shown so you can follow it. The Delinquency Predictor and Failure Score are weighted composites of payment behaviour, public records, age, size and trend, scaled onto the published ranges — the weights are mine, the ranges and classes are D&B's. The Rating classification table is D&B's published table, applied exactly, including the no-financials cap.
Educational model only. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or derived from Dun & Bradstreet. PAYDEX and D&B are trademarks of Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. This tool cannot reproduce actual D&B scores or ratings and is not credit advice. Runs entirely in your browser — no inputs are stored or transmitted.