Does Your Credit Report List Requests for Your Credit Report?

The credit bureaus know everything about your financial history, even how many times you look at your own report. However, the bureaus protect you from discrimination unless the request for a credit report is made for a lending decision you initiate, called a hard inquiry. You want to check your report frequently for hard inquiries, because they can be as bad as anything else in your credit history.

Identification

The national credit bureaus list all credit inquiries on your credit report, usually under the credit report summary section. They divide the inquiry portion into hard and soft checks. Soft checks never hurt your score in any way and lenders will never know how many you have, even if they pull your report. The bureaus hide soft inquiries so lenders cannot make informal judgments about them, such as suspecting someone of worrying about a low score by checking it too much.

Importance

You can mostly disregard soft inquiries unless you care about who sends you pre-approved credit card offers. The biggest concern is hard inquiries, because they lower your score a few points for each one. Once you have more than six hard checks in any 12-month period, expect significant harm to your credit score, and lenders might be afraid you are hunting for credit because of some immediate financial disaster.

Time Frame

All credit inquiries disappear from your credit file after two years, according to the Fair Isaac Corporation. Hard inquiries, however, only impact your FICO score during their first year on your report. Unlike other negative items, hard inquiries impact your score by the same amount as long as they stick to your report.

Tip

Always dispute a hard inquiry if you never gave the creditor consent to run a check, because every point counts when applying for a loan. Five points, for example, could put you just out of reach of the upper tier of scores. You can also ask the creditor listed in the report to delete the inquiry. Most will oblige because they do not want to bother searching for the authorization document.