Soft Pull vs. Hard Pull: What Affects Your Credit Score

Only one of these two kinds of credit check can move your score, and when it does, FICO's own education pages put the typical cost at fewer than five points. That's the hard pull. The soft pull, which covers most of the credit checks that happen in your life, never moves your score at all, no matter how many of them pile up.

If you've been avoiding checking your own credit because you're afraid of what the check itself might do, you can stop. That specific worry has a clean, documented answer: nothing.

What's the difference between a soft pull and a hard pull?

A hard pull happens when you apply for new credit and a lender checks your report to make a lending decision. A soft pull is essentially every other look at your file: checks that aren't tied to an application you submitted for new credit.

Soft pulls include checking your own score or report, the prequalified card offers that show up in your mailbox, an employer's background screening (which requires your written consent), your existing card issuer reviewing your account, insurance quotes, and eligibility checks like the one Felix runs, which is why our privacy policy describes exactly what happens to that report data. None of these can cost you a point.

Hard pulls come from applications: a credit card, a mortgage, an auto loan, a personal loan, a private student loan, or a request to raise your credit limit. A few situations sit in between. Renting is the common one: landlords usually work through tenant-screening companies, an industry the CFPB has examined in its own market report, and what those screeners pull varies by provider. Ask the landlord which kind of check they run before you apply.

	Soft pull	Hard pull
Who starts it	You (checking your own file), or a company screening or reviewing you	You, by applying for new credit
Score effect	None, ever, under any scoring model	Typically fewer than 5 FICO points, fading to zero after 12 months
Who sees it	Only you, on your own copy of the report	Any lender who pulls your report
How long it stays	Up to 2 years, on your copy only	Up to 2 years; scored for only the first 12 months

• Who starts it

  Soft pull

  You (checking your own file), or a company screening or reviewing you

  Hard pull

  You, by applying for new credit

• Score effect

  Soft pull

  None, ever, under any scoring model

  Hard pull

  Typically fewer than 5 FICO points, fading to zero after 12 months

• Who sees it

  Soft pull

  Only you, on your own copy of the report

  Hard pull

  Any lender who pulls your report

• How long it stays

  Soft pull

  Up to 2 years, on your copy only

  Hard pull

  Up to 2 years; scored for only the first 12 months

Fair Isaac Corporation (myFICO), Credit Checks and Inquiries; Experian, Hard Inquiry vs. Soft Inquiry (October 2024).

How much does a hard inquiry actually hurt your score?

Less than almost anything else on your report. FICO's published guidance is that one additional hard inquiry takes fewer than five points off most people's scores, and for people with long histories and thick files it often costs nothing measurable at all.

5

points or fewer: what one additional hard inquiry typically costs a FICO score

That figure comes from FICO's own consumer education site, and it fades to nothing after 12 months. For comparison, a single new collection account can cost ten to twenty times as much.

Fair Isaac Corporation (myFICO), Credit Checks and Inquiries.

The timing matters more than most people realize. A hard inquiry stays visible on your report for up to two years, but FICO scores only count inquiries from the last 12 months. So the mark you can see and the mark that's actually scoring against you are different things for half the inquiry's life.

Rate shopping gets its own protection. When you're comparing offers for one auto loan, mortgage, or student loan, FICO treats every inquiry inside the shopping window as a single inquiry. The catch is that the window depends on which score version the lender uses: older FICO models use a 14-day span, newer ones use 45 days. You can't know which model a given lender pulls, so the safe play is to compress your applications into two weeks. FICO models also ignore mortgage, auto, and student loan inquiries entirely for the first 30 days, which means shopping this month can't hurt the score a lender pulls this month.

That protection covers loans where comparing rates is expected. It does not cover credit cards: five card applications in a month are five separate inquiries, and lenders can read the pattern itself as a sign you're stretched.

Who can pull your credit, and who sees what?

Nobody gets your report just because they want it. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, at 15 U.S.C. § 1681b, lists the permissible purposes: a credit transaction you initiated, review of an account you already have, insurance underwriting, employment screening with your written consent, a court order, or your own request. Everything else is off the list, and pulling a report without a permissible purpose violates federal law.

That's what makes an unauthorized hard inquiry more than an annoyance. If an application you never submitted shows up as a hard pull, it's disputable with each bureau reporting it, and it can also be the first visible sign of identity theft. The mechanics of challenging it are the same as any other reporting error, and our guide to disputing an error on your credit report walks through the written dispute that forces an investigation.

Visibility splits cleanly along the same line. Hard inquiries appear to any lender who pulls your file, which is why a burst of them raises questions. Soft inquiries appear only on the copy you request yourself: FICO's documentation is explicit that they're not visible to lenders viewing your report. Your own view lists them so you can audit who has looked, but no lender sees them and no model scores them.

When is inquiry anxiety misplaced, and when is it justified?

Mostly misplaced. Scores are driven by payment history and how much of your available credit you're using; inquiries are a rounding error next to either. A single new collection can drop a score by far more than a dozen inquiries, and how much a collection actually costs your score makes that gap concrete. If your report already carries derogatory marks, the points you'd protect by never applying for anything are small next to what getting collections off your report or resolving a charge-off or collection entry could recover. Even the score effect of settling a debt is a bigger, and more worthwhile, question than any inquiry.

The worry earns its keep in exactly two situations. First, a genuine spray of card applications in a short window, where the inquiries compound and the pattern itself looks like distress. Second, the months right before a mortgage application, when even a few points can matter at a rate cutoff and underwriters read recent inquiries closely. If neither describes you, inquiries are the wrong thing to be losing sleep over.

And checking on yourself is always free of consequence. Your reports from all three bureaus are available every week at no charge through AnnualCreditReport.com, every request is a soft pull, and how to read your credit report covers what to look for once you have them, including stray inquiries you don't recognize and collection entries that should have aged off.

Where Felix fits

Felix starts with your credit report, so it matters what kind of check that is: a soft pull, the kind this whole post says can't move your score. You see your ranked accounts, decide which debts to enroll, and every negotiation letter that goes out is one you've read and signed yourself. There's no application to a lender anywhere in that flow, so there's no hard inquiry in it either. The FAQ covers how the credit check works and what Felix does and doesn't do with it.