If you’ve gotten a mortgage in the last few weeks, you probably noticed some changes to the fees for getting that loan, depending on your income level and credit worthiness.

Planned changes to the Loan Level Price Adjustments used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, due to be in place by May 1, are already altering the amount of upfront fees borrowers are asked to fork over when they buy a home, officials say.

According to a spokesperson the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, those price adjustments are reviewed and tweaked frequently, but this year’s changes are admittedly broader than most single year adjustments.

David Stevens, who served as a Federal Housing Administration commissioner under former President Barack Obama, told the New York Post that the Biden Administration’s decision to change the Loan Level Price Adjustments to the degree the FHFA has is “unprecedented.”

“This was a blatant and significant cut of fees for their highest-risk borrowers and a clear increase in much better credit quality buyers – which just clarified to the world that this move was a pretty significant cross-subsidy pricing change,” Stevens, who previously served as CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, told the Post.

According to FHFA Director Sandra Thompson, the changes to the tables used by “the Enterprises,” as her agency refers to Freddie and Fannie, to determine upfront mortgage fees are both overdue and in keeping with the finance companies’ charters — which require them to prioritize lending for those most in need of help in securing a loan.

“It had been many years since a comprehensive review of the Enterprises’ pricing framework was conducted. FHFA launched such a review in 2021. The objectives were to maintain support for purchase borrowers limited by income or wealth, ensure a level playing field for large and small lenders, foster capital accumulation at the Enterprises, and achieve commercially viable returns on capital over time,” she said in a statement.

The result of those changes, according to an FHFA official who agreed to speak to the Herald on background, is that upfront fees for many first time home buyers with good or excellent credit but lower income or smaller down payments have been eliminated entirely — while fees for second and vacation home buyers have been deliberately increased, and fees for high-income borrowers potentially but not necessarily changed.

This means that upfront costs for higher income earners or those already in homes may be higher than they were before, but will still be significantly lower than for those borrowers with a lower income to debt ratio or a bad credit score.

“​Higher-credit-score borrowers are not being charged more so that lower-credit-score borrowers can pay less. The updated fees, as was true of the prior fees, generally increase as credit scores decrease for any given level of down payment,” Thompson said in her statement. “Some updated fees are higher and some are lower, in differing amounts. They do not represent pure decreases for high-risk borrowers or pure increases for low-risk borrowers. Many borrowers with high credit scores or large down payments will see their fees decrease or remain flat.”

The fee changes are due to be in place by May 1, though many lenders have already started using the new schedule in order to meet that deadline, the FHFA spokesperson told the Herald.

According to Matthew Graham, Chief Operating Officer at Mortgage News Daily, the fee change closes the gap between what a high credit score borrow pays compared to a lower scored homebuyer, but it doesn’t eliminate it altogether or reverse it.

“If you have a score of 640, you’ll be paying significantly more than if you had a 740,” he wrote. “Using an 80% loan-to-value ratio as an example, your LLPA at 640 is 2.25% versus 0.875% for a 740 score. That’s a difference of 1.375%, or just over $4000 on a $300k mortgage. This is almost half the previous difference, and that’s certainly a big change.”