How Many Hard Inquiries Are Too Many?
6 Min Read | Last updated: July 3, 2025
See how many hard inquiries are too many and how they can affect your credit score. See tips to manage hard inquiries to help protect your credit.
At-A-Glance
- Hard inquiries could stay on your credit report for two years, but unlike soft credit checks, they could negatively impact your credit score.
- Currently, there’s no official number of hard credit checks that count as too many, but multiple applications for new credit cards within a short time frame could negatively impact your chances of being approved.
- Fortunately, inquiries triggered during a 14-to-45-day period of loan rate shopping may be treated as a single check and impact your credit score even less, depending on the credit scoring model that’s being used.
Check your inbox on any given day, and you might find at least one lending offer from a credit card company, bank, or car dealership promising savings, low Annual Percentage Rates (APRs), or refinancing deals. Some may be well worth pursuing, but before filling out the paperwork, consider that formal applications for loans or credit lines may trigger a hard credit check that could temporarily lower your credit score.
Hard checks are a routine step in borrowing decisions, but how many inquiries are too many?
Keep reading to understand why hard credit checks impact your credit score, why soft inquiries don’t, and what steps you can take to help protect your credit score when shopping for credit cards.
What Is a Hard Inquiry?
Whenever you or a legally authorized company, person, or organization obtains your credit report, inquiries appear on the report as either soft or hard. Hard inquiries may occur when you formally apply for credit, be it a new credit card, a car loan, or a mortgage. Sometimes, rental or lease applications and credit line increase requests require a hard inquiry. In these instances, creditors may contact the three national credit bureaus, namely Experian®, TransUnion®, and Equifax®, to access your credit report for details about your creditworthiness before making a decision.1
How Do Hard Inquiries Impact Credit Scores?
Though the effects can be minimal, hard inquiries can impact your credit score:
- Usually, just one hard inquiry knocks less than five points off your FICO® Score.2
- FICO notes that individuals with fewer accounts or a short credit history may experience a greater negative impact on their credit scores.3
- Hard inquiries account for an estimated 10% of your total FICO Score, and it’s worth noting that they stay on your credit report for two years.4
- Fortunately, only hard inquiries from the last 12 months factor into FICO scoring.5
Hard vs. Soft Credit Inquiries
Soft inquiries or soft checks occur when you check your credit report or when a business checks it without you having requested credit. You might see a soft inquiry on your credit report after a credit card company sends you an unsolicited prequalification or preapproval offer. Because a soft inquiry isn’t a determining factor in whether a creditor lends you money, it doesn’t influence your credit score.6
How Many Hard Credit Inquiries Are Too Many?
There may never be a specific number of hard credit checks that count as too many, but several hard inquiries for multiple lines of credit occurring in a short period might work against you. Statistically, there may also be reason to believe that six or more hard inquiries on your credit report could mean you’re more likely to declare bankruptcy than someone with no inquiries.7 However, popular credit scoring models could be forgiving if you trigger hard inquiries while rate shopping to find the best loan terms or when applying for multiple loans in general.
Here’s how:
- For multiple installment loan applications submitted within a short period, both VantageScore® and FICO usually group the associated hard inquiries as a single event.8
- More current FICO Score versions consider 45 days as a short period.9
- Some older FICO Score versions consider a short period to be just 14 days.10
- The VantageScore system has a two-week rolling window, where applications submitted less than two weeks apart are treated as one inquiry.11
If you time your applications correctly, hard credit checks don’t have to negatively impact your scores in lasting ways. You may want to loan rate shop within that two-week VantageScore window to boost your chances of a single-inquiry outcome.
How to Manage Hard Inquiries
If you need a credit card or foresee a major purchase on the near horizon, you might still benefit from holding off on new card offers. One way to protect your credit score when applying for credit cards is by looking to get preapproved or prequalified first, with an initial soft check, to see if you meet the initial eligibility requirements. This allows you to see if you may be approved for a credit card with no initial hard credit check, and no impact to your credit score. If you’re prequalified, and choose to accept the credit card offer, a hard credit check will be done at this time.
Get matched with American Express® Credit Card offers by seeing which cards you pre-qualify for.
Here are some general rules to keep in mind regarding credit card inquiries:
- Scoring systems typically aren’t super forgiving of multiple credit card inquiries in a short time, so applying for multiple cards at once often isn’t in your favor.12
- Try to space out credit card applications by at least six months.13 Unless you are able to get prequalified with no initial impact to your credit score.
- In addition to using card-matching tools, comparing cards that suit your needs before sending out applications may help you space out your inquiries by eliminating cards that wouldn’t do much to support your financial goals anyway.
If you’re loan shopping, these tips might help you manage your hard inquiries for minimal credit score impacts:
- You can check your credit report for free to see if your profile meets your lender’s requirements before wasting a potential hard inquiry.
- After successfully securing a loan, you may want to regularly check your credit report to make sure the inquiry falls off when it should.
- Creating a budget that reflects your payments and realistically accounts for your spending habits may help you avoid relying too much on credit in the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
Theoretically, you could have dozens or hundreds of soft credit inquiries without impacting your score.14 Soft inquiries play a minimal role in how lenders view you, so you can check your credit reports and scores without hesitation.
There isn’t readily available data on Americans' average number of inquiries on their credit report each year. However, depending on which institutions you apply with, you could have a limit to how many cards you can open and, therefore, how many inquiries you have at any given time.
There is no cap on how often you can check your credit score. However, it can take time for credit scoring models to process new information and update your scores in either direction, so checking constantly may not be necessary.
The Takeaway
When you fill out a loan or credit card application, lenders and issuers can conduct a hard credit inquiry to assess your risk level, and multiple hard checks within a short window could look risky to lenders. While each hard inquiry on your credit report could temporarily lower your scores by a few points, rate shopping for loans within a specific timeframe could help your hard checks to be grouped as a single inquiry. When it comes to credit cards, it may often benefit you to hold off on multiple applications at once.
3 “What is New Credit?,” myFICO
4,5 “What Is a Hard Inquiry and How Does It Affect Credit?,” Experian
7 “Does Checking Your Credit Score Lower it?,” myFICO
1,2,6 “Hard Inquiry vs. Soft Inquiry: What’s the Difference?,” Experian
8,9,10,11,12 “How Does Rate Shopping Affect Your Credit Scores?,” Experian
13 “Why do I have a ‘hard inquiry’ on my credit report—and what does that do to my credit score?,” CNBC
14 “What Is a Soft Inquiry?,” Experian
Randi Gollin is a freelance writer and editor who has covered lifestyle and business topics for digital publications and tech and media brands.
All Credit Intel content is written by freelance authors and commissioned and paid for by American Express.
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