Hard vs. Soft Inquiries: What Counts Against You
Which credit checks affect your score, how long they last, how rate shopping is treated, and when an inquiry is worth disputing.
Every time someone looks at your credit, it leaves a record. Only some of those records matter.
Soft inquiries
A soft inquiry happens when there is no application for new credit behind it:
- You check your own credit report or score
- A credit monitoring service pulls your file
- A company pre-screens you for a mailed offer
- An existing creditor reviews your account
- An employer runs a background check with your permission
Soft inquiries appear only on the copy of the report you see. Lenders do not see them. They do not affect your score in any scoring model. Checking your own credit cannot hurt it — this is worth repeating, because the belief that it can keeps people from looking at their own file.
Hard inquiries
A hard inquiry happens when you apply for credit and a lender pulls your report to make a decision: a credit card application, a car loan, a mortgage, a personal loan, sometimes a rental application or a utility account.
- They are visible to other lenders
- They stay on your report for two years
- Most scoring models only factor them in for the first twelve months
- The effect of a single inquiry is usually small, often a few points
The effect is larger if you have a short credit history or few accounts, because each data point carries more weight in a thin file.
Rate shopping
Applying to five credit cards in a week looks like distress. Applying to five mortgage lenders in a week looks like a person shopping for a rate, which is exactly what consumers are supposed to do.
Scoring models handle this with a deduplication window: multiple inquiries of the same type — mortgage, auto, student loan — within a short period are counted as a single inquiry. The window varies by model, commonly between 14 and 45 days. Credit card applications are generally not deduplicated this way.
The practical advice: if you are shopping for a mortgage or a car loan, do all of your applications inside a two-week window rather than spreading them over three months.
Disputing an inquiry
An inquiry can be disputed if you did not authorize it. That is the standard — not whether it is inconvenient.
If you see a hard inquiry from a lender you have never applied to, that is worth pursuing, and it may be a sign of something larger. Check the rest of the report for accounts you do not recognize, and consider a fraud alert or a security freeze.
If you did apply, the inquiry is accurate, and it will come off on its own schedule. Services that promise to "remove hard inquiries" are usually either disputing accurate records or charging you for something time does for free.
How much should you worry about this?
Less than most people do. Inquiries are roughly a tenth of your score, shared with other "new credit" signals, and they fade quickly. If you are choosing between opening a card that will help your utilization and avoiding an inquiry, the utilization usually wins.