Every time someone checks your credit, it’s logged as either a hard inquiry or a soft inquiry — and only one of those two actually touches your score. Confusing the two is one of the most common reasons people either avoid checking their own credit (unnecessary) or get surprised by a small score dip after applying for something (avoidable, if you understand the exception below).
What Makes an Inquiry “Hard”
A hard inquiry happens specifically when you apply for new credit — a credit card, an auto loan, a mortgage, a new line of credit — and the lender pulls your full credit report to decide whether to approve you. Because it’s tied to an actual credit application, it signals real, current credit-seeking behavior, which is why it factors into your score.
What Makes an Inquiry “Soft”
A soft inquiry happens when your credit is checked without a new-credit application attached to it: checking your own score, a credit card issuer pre-qualifying you for an offer, an employer background check, or an existing lender periodically reviewing your account. A soft inquiry may still show up on your credit report, but according to FICO, it does not affect your score in any way — not even a fraction of a point.
The Real Point Impact
According to FICO’s own published methodology, a single hard inquiry typically costs fewer than 5 points. If you already have a long, healthy credit history, the impact tends to be smaller still; if your file is thin, the same inquiry can knock off closer to the top of that range. The damage isn’t permanent either: a hard inquiry stays on your report for up to two years, but most scoring models stop counting it against your score after just 12 months.
The Rate-Shopping Exception Almost Nobody Uses Correctly
This is the single most useful fact in this topic. If you’re shopping for a mortgage, auto loan, or student loan, FICO’s scoring models are built to recognize rate shopping and treat multiple inquiries for the same type of loan within a short window as a single inquiry — 45 days under newer FICO models, 14 days under older ones. In practice, that means getting quotes from five different mortgage lenders in the same two-week window costs you roughly the same few points as getting a quote from just one. Spreading those same five applications out over three months, by contrast, could rack up five separate hard-inquiry hits. If you’re rate shopping for a major purchase, compress your applications into the shortest window you can manage.
What Doesn’t Get This Protection
The rate-shopping window applies to loans, not to credit cards. Applying for three different credit cards over a few weeks generates three separate hard inquiries with no bundling protection — each one is evaluated on its own. If you’re planning a major purchase like a mortgage in the near future, it’s worth avoiding new credit card applications in the months beforehand, since stacked recent inquiries (of any kind) can make an underwriter look twice even after the score itself has mostly recovered.
Inquiries are just one input into your score — for the bigger picture of how utilization, payment history, and account mix are weighted differently across models, see our FICO vs. VantageScore breakdown, and if you are actively building credit from scratch, see our guide to secured cards vs. credit-builder loans.
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