How Many Credit Inquiries Can You Have Until It Hurts Your Score?

Every time you open a credit card or have your credit queried you receive a ‘credit inquiry.’ These record requests aren’t always benign and can add up to do damage to your credit score. So how many does it take to start to hurt your score?

What Is A Credit Inquiry

A credit inquiry is essentially a record request of your credit report. This happens when you apply for a loan or a credit card. Say you walk into a store right now and apply for the store credit card at the register. You answer all the questions and the machine quickly approves you for the card. Even though it took 30 seconds to approve you it still performed a credit inquiry on your credit.

There are two kinds of credit inquiries, hard and soft. Hard inquiries are when a creditor runs a credit report check on you when you apply for a loan or credit card and a soft inquiry is when you run a credit report check on yourself. If an employer or an insurance company runs a background check on you that also shows up as a soft inquiry.

Why Should I Limit Inquiries?

Hard inquiries are the only ones you should generally worry about. Lenders see too many hard inquiries as a red flag because that can show them that you are too reliant on loans and credit cards because you are constantly trying to apply for them and possibly getting denied. If you keep applying it is probably because you are being denied, unless you are opening a ton of new accounts.

New (hard) inquiries make up for about 10 percent of your credit score so if you are constantly applying for new cards or loans that could lower your score significantly.

How Many Is Okay?

You should only be applying for new credit cards when you need a new credit card. Otherwise one or two a year is nothing to worry about but anything more can be worrying. If you are applying and getting denied you need to investigate why rather than continue applying.

The one exception to this is when you are applying for mortgages because you will want to apply to a few to get the best rates. In this case as long as you do this within a 45 day window it will not damage your score. 

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