How Long Do Hard Inquiries Stay on Your Credit Report?
8 Min Read | Last updated: May 20, 2026
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Understand the impact of hard inquiries on your credit and learn how good credit habits can help improve your score over time.
At-A-Glance
- When you submit a new borrowing application, lenders and credit card issuers routinely conduct a thorough risk assessment of your credit history.
- Hard inquiries temporarily lower your scores, remain visible on your credit report for a set time, and can often signal higher risk if they happen frequently and close together.
- You can help reduce the impact of a hard inquiry by opting for prequalified offers, rate-shopping within a specific timeframe, and spacing out applications.
If you’ve recently taken out a credit card or loan and you saw your credit score drop, there’s no need to panic. Your lender likely ran a routine hard inquiry—also called a hard credit check or a hard pull—on your credit history. And while hard inquiries can have a slight negative impact on your credit score initially, it’s usually temporary.
Understanding why and for how long hard inquiries remain on your credit report may help you manage their impact with greater confidence.
Hard Inquiries vs. Soft Inquiries
Lenders typically conduct hard inquiries whenever you apply for a new loan or credit card, and that involves a close analysis of your credit history to help assess your risk level. That signal appears as a minor negative mark on your credit report. Soft inquiries are different—they’re typically much less invasive and don’t impact your score.
How Long Do Credit Inquiries Stay on Your Credit Report?
There are some key differences in duration and impact for each type of inquiry.
Hard Inquiries
- Stay on your credit report for up to 2 years.1
- Typically ding your FICO® Scores (the most common type) by no more than 5 points.2 But VantageScore credit scores could drop by as much as 10 points.3
- Require your permission (often through submitting a new credit application or when requesting a credit line increase).
- Factor into one of the five credit scoring factors, new credit, which accounts for 10% of your score.4
Soft Inquiries
- Also stay on your credit report for 2 years, but with no effect.
- Aren’t a credit-scoring factor.
- Don’t necessarily require your permission.
- Can happen for multiple reasons, including monitoring your own credit score for free.
How Do Hard Inquiries Impact Your Credit Scores?
Triggering too many hard inquiries in a short period of time—generally more than one every 12 months—may signal to FICO Scoring models that you’re struggling to manage debt.5 The longer the time between new credit applications, the more responsible your borrowing habits appear. That said, having a couple of hard inquiries over a few years likely won’t raise any red flags, given that they’re spaced out.
Tips For Reducing the Impact of Hard Inquiries
If you’re concerned that hard inquiries are impacting your credit scores too much, there are a few strategies to be aware of:
- The 45-Day Advantage
FICO Scores recognize that multiple hard checks within a 14-45-day period likely signal rate shopping and are lumped into a single inquiry.6 So if you’re shopping for the best mortgage or car loan, try limiting those application submissions to that timeframe. - Credit Freezing or Locking
If you know you’re not going to apply for any new credit anytime soon, you can lock your credit report to block hard inquiries. Blocking inquiries may help stop fraudsters from opening new accounts in your name at the expense of your credit score. - Regular Credit Monitoring
You can review your credit reports for free once a year with annualcreditreport.com or access your Experian® credit report with American Express® MyCredit Guide. As you review, you can check for fraudulent credit applications or mistakes and dispute them. - Prequalification
Many credit card issuers offer pre-qualification tools that let you gauge your approval odds. Opting for prequalified offers over more competitive ones could help you avoid a double-whammy situation where your credit drops and your application is rejected.
In the background, there are other actions you can take that continuously help to improve your credit score over time:
- On-Time Payments
Late credit payments negatively affect your scores. Making all your mortgage, auto loan, credit card, and student loan payments—or any other bills that may be reported to credit bureaus—on time is a best practice. - Lower or $0 Balances
Your credit utilization ratio is the amount of credit you’re currently using compared to your overall amount of credit. Keeping that ratio between 1-10% could help impress lenders and positively impact your credit scores.7 - Healthy Credit Mix
Credit mix refers to the diversity of your credit profile. For example, having well-managed credit card, car loan, and mortgage accounts would look more attractive than a single well-managed credit card. As your finances grow, it may be a good idea to diversify your accounts over time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nope. Checking your credit scores on your own triggers a soft credit check, which doesn’t impact your credit scores. You can check your score as many times as you’d like without any negative marks.
That depends on your reason for the request. If you plan to increase your available credit while keeping your balances low, you can lower your utilization ratio and positively impact your scores. But you may not even have to request an increase that triggers a hard check, since many banks may just initiate it on their own.8
It could, but it’s not the most impactful way to improve your credit. The impact of a hard inquiry is usually minimal. You’d probably see a greater positive impact when paying on time, paying off your monthly balance, or keeping your credit utilization low.
The Takeaway
Hard inquiries are a routine part of new credit applications, and they have a minimal negative impact on your credit. They typically stay on your credit report for 2 years, but their effect is fractional after 12 months. To minimize their impact, you can opt for prequalified offers, space out your applications, and get into the habit of monitoring or locking your credit reports to help prevent fraudulent activity that triggers hard pulls.
1,5,6 “Does Checking Your Credit Score Lower it?,” myFICO
2,3 “How credit inquiries affect your credit score,” Bankrate
4 “What Affects Your Credit Scores?,” Experian
7 “Understand the Ins and Outs of Credit,” Office of Financial Readiness
8 “More Credit, More Debt: New Evidence on Automated Credit Decisions,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Anna Baluch is a personal finance writer from Cleveland, OH. She enjoys helping people from all walks of life make smart financial decisions. Her work can be seen on Credit Karma, Forbes, LendingTree, Insurify, and many other publications. Connect with Anna on LinkedIn.
All Credit Intel content is written by freelance authors and commissioned and paid for by American Express.
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