Apply for a card, a car loan or a mortgage, and the lender’s pull leaves a line on your credit report carrying its name and the date. That line runs on two clocks. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion display a hard inquiry for up to two years, and FICO Scores count it for the first 12 months only (FICO, 2026). The two-year clock is the one every answer quotes. The 12-month clock is the one a FICO Score actually reads.
The pull happens whether or not you get the credit. The overall rejection rate for credit applications of any kind over the prior twelve months was 16.1% as of June 2026, per the New York Fed’s Credit Access Survey (New York Fed, 2026), and a declined application leaves the same inquiry on the report as an approved one. An inquiry you never made is a different problem again. In its 2024 annual report on credit reporting complaints, the CFPB said consumers most often described inaccuracies in credit inquiries, account and payment status, and personal information (CFPB, 2024).
A Hard Inquiry Is the Record a Lender Leaves When You Apply
A hard inquiry, also called a hard pull or hard credit check, is logged when you apply for new credit and a lender pulls your full report from Equifax, Experian or TransUnion. The entry names the lender, the date of the inquiry and the type of credit applied for. It sits only on the report that was pulled, so one application can show at one bureau and not at the other two, and any later lender pulling that same report sees it.
Applications for credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, personal loans, student loans and business loans generate one. So can an apartment where the landlord runs a credit check, or a utility that pulls credit to decide on a deposit. Checking your own credit, an employer background check that does not include credit, and a prequalified offer you never applied for do not.
The pull runs on permissible purpose. Section 604 of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, at 15 U.S.C. § 1681b, lets a bureau furnish your report to a lender for a credit transaction you initiated, and lists the other purposes a report may be pulled for. Applying is the authorization. A lender that pulls your file with no application of yours behind it has no permissible purpose, which is what makes that inquiry disputable.
Equifax, Experian and TransUnion Display a Hard Inquiry for 2 Years
Two years is how long the three nationwide bureaus show a hard inquiry, and FICO’s own credit-education pages give the same figure: an inquiry stays on the report for up to two years (FICO, 2026). The figure is bureau practice. The FCRA’s disclosure rule at 15 U.S.C. § 1681g requires a bureau to list on your own copy every person who pulled your report for a credit purpose in the preceding year, and for employment in the preceding two years. The second year of credit-inquiry display is what the bureaus add on top of that duty.
Section 605, the provision that ages most negative items off after seven years, carries no two-year rule for inquiries. An inquiry still showing in month 25 is past the bureaus’ own display window. Ask the bureau showing it to take it off, and dispute it in writing if it stays; the request rests on the bureau’s own policy, since no FCRA section makes the 25th month a violation.
The two years belong to the inquiry alone. An account opened from the application reports on its own terms: a credit card opened in 2023 shows as an open account for as long as it stays open, while the inquiry that came with it aged off in 2025. Negative accounts run on a separate seven-year clock, set out in our guide to how long negative information stays on a credit report.
FICO Counts a Hard Inquiry for 12 Months, Then Stops
FICO Scores only consider inquiries from the last 12 months (FICO, 2026). From month 13 through month 24 the inquiry is visible to any lender reading the report and absent from the FICO calculation. An underwriter can still see it. The scoring model no longer counts it.
VantageScore does not publish the same cutoff. Its consumer guide says an application drops the score by a few points and that all hard inquiries inside a 14-day period count as one (VantageScore, 2026), and it names no month at which an inquiry stops counting. The 12-month rule is FICO’s, and it is safest read as FICO’s alone.
That window is what to plan around. An inquiry from 14 months ago is on the report and out of the FICO Score; one from 11 months ago is still in it. If a mortgage or car loan is on the calendar, the inquiries that count are the ones from the 12 months before the lender pulls.
| Time since the pull | On the report? | Counted in a FICO Score? |
|---|---|---|
| Mortgage, auto or student loan pull, first 30 days | Yes | No, FICO ignores these inquiries in the 30 days before scoring |
| Day 1 to month 12 | Yes, at the bureau that was pulled | Yes |
| Month 13 to month 24 | Yes, and any lender reading the report sees it | No |
| After month 24 | No, under Equifax, Experian and TransUnion’s display practice | No |
How Many Points Does One Hard Inquiry Cost?
FICO publishes two figures on two of its own pages. Its Credit checks and inquiries page says one additional inquiry takes less than five points off FICO Scores for most people, and its page on soft and hard pulls puts the average at five to ten points (FICO, 2026). Both are averages across files. Neither is a price a given file will pay.
The size depends on the file around the inquiry. FICO states that inquiries can have a greater impact on a file with few accounts or a short credit history (FICO, 2026). New credit, the category inquiries sit in, carries 10% of a FICO Score, against 35% for payment history and 30% for amounts owed (FICO, 2026). One pull competes for a tenth of the score with every account you have recently opened.
The effect is temporary by construction. FICO stops counting the inquiry at 12 months whatever its size, and several unrelated applications in the same stretch each count on their own. What a single inquiry does against a whole file is covered in our guide to whether hard inquiries hurt your credit score.
FICO Pools Mortgage, Auto and Student Loan Shopping Into 1 Inquiry
Shopping for a rate is scored differently from applying for separate credit. On FICO’s recent formulas, hard inquiries of the same type, meaning student, auto or mortgage loans, inside a 45-day window count as a single inquiry, and older versions use a 14-day span. FICO also ignores mortgage, auto and student loan inquiries made in the 30 days prior to scoring (FICO, 2026). Classic FICO, the older family mortgage lenders still pull, remains permitted on loans delivered to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s credit score policy (FHFA, 2026), so the 14-day span still governs some mortgage files.
The pooling is by type. Mortgage inquiries do not pool with auto loan inquiries, and FICO does not pool credit card applications at all. Three card applications in a week are three FICO inquiries; three mortgage quotes in a week are one.
VantageScore draws the line wider. The Complete Guide to Your VantageScore says it considers all hard inquiries inside a 14-day period as a single inquiry, with no type restriction (VantageScore, 2026). Fourteen days fits inside every window above, so a shopper who finishes inside two weeks is pooled on every model. The mortgage timing is set out in our guide to the mortgage rate shopping window.
FICO and VantageScore Read the Same Inquiry Differently
The two models agree that soft inquiries do not count and that rate shopping should not be scored as a string of separate applications. They part on the details:
| Rule | FICO | VantageScore |
|---|---|---|
| How long an inquiry counts in the score | 12 months | Not stated in its consumer guide |
| Rate-shopping window | 45 days on recent versions, 14 days on older ones | 14 days |
| Which inquiries pool | Same-type mortgage, auto or student loan inquiries | All hard inquiries in the window |
| Credit card applications | Each one counts | Pooled inside the 14 days |
| Recent-shopping buffer | Mortgage, auto and student loan inquiries in the 30 days before scoring are ignored | Not stated in its consumer guide |
The gap matters to one shopper in particular: the one whose mortgage or auto quotes spread across more than 14 days and fewer than 45. Recent FICO versions count those quotes as one inquiry, while VantageScore and older FICO versions count more than one.
Soft Inquiries Never Touch a Credit Score
A soft inquiry, sometimes called a soft pull, is logged when someone reads your file without a live application. Checking your own credit, employer background checks, prequalified offers from lenders, account reviews by creditors you already have, and insurance company pulls are all soft. FICO states that soft pulls do not affect the score and are not visible to lenders who view your credit report (FICO, 2026).
They are not counted in FICO’s new credit category, and you can check your own reports as often as you want at no cost to the score. The prescreened offers arrive without your application because Section 604 lets a bureau furnish a list for a firm offer of credit, which is a soft access. The full split between the two is in our guide to soft vs hard credit inquiries.
Trace an Inquiry You Don’t Recognize Before You Dispute It
A name you do not recognize is a lead to run down first. Corporate names on a report often differ from the brand on the card or the dealership sign, and the report lists the name and contact information for every inquiry.
- Pull all three reports. An inquiry shows only at the bureau that was pulled, so read the inquiry section at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
- Match each name and date against every application you made, dealership financing included.
- Call the lender listed. It may be able to identify the application that triggered the pull.
- Dispute what does not match. If the lender cannot identify an application of yours, or confirms someone else applied, dispute it with every bureau showing it.
- Report identity theft at IdentityTheft.gov and place a fraud alert or a credit freeze, which stops further pulls in your name and gives you a record if the matter escalates.
An inquiry that belongs to someone else is one form of the largest complaint category about credit reports. Of the 3,482,718 complaints recorded in the CFPB’s public Consumer Complaint Database about incorrect information on a credit report between July 2025 and June 2026, 66.9% said the information belongs to someone else; account information incorrect was 18.4% and account status incorrect 8.7%. These are unverified consumer allegations. The CFPB does not confirm the facts alleged, a count tracks a company’s size as well as its conduct, and the regulator attributes much of the recent surge in filings to credit repair organizations, social-media-driven submissions and AI agents filing for consumers.
Section 611 Gives the Bureau 30 Days to Investigate an Unauthorized Inquiry
An unauthorized hard inquiry is one that appears without your permission. The usual causes are identity theft, a lender pulling the wrong consumer’s file, and a merchant pull that went beyond what you authorized. Each is a pull without a permissible purpose under Section 604.
The dispute goes to the bureau in writing. Name the inquiry, give its date, and state that you did not authorize a pull by that lender. Under Section 611, at 15 U.S.C. § 1681i, the bureau must complete a reasonable reinvestigation within 30 days of receiving the dispute, extendable by up to 15 days if you send relevant information during that period. Where the disputed item is found inaccurate or cannot be verified, Section 611(a)(5)(A) requires the bureau to delete it or modify it.
Identity theft adds three stronger tools. Section 605B requires a bureau to block information you identify as resulting from identity theft within 4 business days of receiving proof of your identity, an identity theft report, the identification of the information, and your statement that it does not relate to a transaction of yours. An initial fraud alert under Section 605A lasts at least 1 year and needs no police report. A security freeze must be placed free within 1 business day of a phone or online request. The FTC received more than 1.1 million identity theft reports through IdentityTheft.gov in 2024 (FTC, 2025).
An Inquiry You Authorized Stays Until It Ages Off
An inquiry from an application you actually made cannot be removed before the 24-month display window closes. The FCRA dispute process covers information that is inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable. An authorized, correctly reported inquiry is none of those, and a bureau that verifies it has no duty to remove it.
Disputing a real inquiry on the bet that a small lender will not answer inside 30 days asks the bureau to delete accurate information. The legal framework does not support it, and a verified inquiry stays. The narrow cases where an inquiry can come off early are in our guide to removing a hard inquiry from a credit report.
Waiting is the route the rules provide. The inquiry leaves FICO’s count at 12 months and the report at 24.
FICO Publishes No Count of Inquiries That Is Too Many
FICO has published no threshold at which inquiries become a problem, because the effect depends on the rest of the file. What it does publish sets the limits: inquiries sit in the 10% new credit category, they count for 12 months, same-type loan shopping pools, and a file with few accounts or a short history feels each one more (FICO, 2026). A lender reading the report sees every inquiry from the past two years, including the ones FICO has stopped counting.
Our own members show how far counts spread. In CreditRefresh’s September 18, 2026 analysis of paying-member data, members carried an average of 13.1 hard inquiries on file as bureau-level entries, with a median of 5. Those are bureau-level entries, so one application pulled at two bureaus appears twice.
Who Spots a Hard Inquiry You Never Made and Who Helps You Challenge It
An authorized inquiry needs only a calendar, because it ages off on its own. An inquiry you never authorized needs two things: someone to see it on all three reports, and a letter to each bureau that shows it. The tools below differ on both halves.
| Tool | What you pay | What that buys | Bureaus | Trustpilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CreditRefresh | $49.99/mo, no setup fee, cancel anytime. Mail letters yourself free, or pay RushMail per letter | Scans all three reports and drafts an FCRA letter for each item you choose to challenge. You review and sign every letter before it goes out | All three | 4.3 (9 reviews) |
| Dispute Beast | From $49.99/mo for required monitoring. Mail letters yourself free, or pay Sprint Mail per letter | Three-bureau reports come through the paid monitoring its free letter tool requires. Mail the letter yourself, or pay Sprint Mail per letter | All three | 4.2 (2,067 reviews) |
| DisputeBee | $49/mo personal, $129/mo business | Letter templates and a letter suggester, with no bundled monitoring. You find the inquiry on your own reports and mail the letter yourself | All three | 3.2 (68 reviews) |
| The Credit People | $99/mo standard, $119/mo premium, or $599 for 6 months | A done-for-you service with unlimited challenges at all three bureaus. You do not see or approve the individual letters | All three | 1.7 (17 reviews) |
| Lexington Law | $139.95/mo, invoiced at the end of each service period | A law firm challenges items on your behalf. There is no self-serve tool for writing your own dispute | All three | 3.2 (624 reviews) |
| Credit Karma | Free, paid for by lender referrals | Free monitoring beside lender offers. Its dispute path reaches TransUnion only, and it drafts no letters | TransUnion | 1.1 (912 reviews) |
Every price is that company’s own published rate, read off that company’s own site on September 15, 2026. Trustpilot scores and review counts as published on September 24, 2026.
A free app paid by lender referrals keeps an application one tap from the score it shows you, and the application is what leaves the inquiry. Eduardo F, 1 star, September 14, 2026, in a Trustpilot review of Credit Karma: “Credit Karma gets people to apply for loans or credit cards with outstanding approval odds which I believe to be a complete lie. So they make me hurt your credit score with hard inquiries, when in actuality you have 0 approval odds, not outstanding.” Whatever the odds screen said, the inquiry stays on the report for two years.
What CreditRefresh Does With an Inquiry You Did Not Authorize
CreditRefresh is included with Refresh Monitoring at $49.99 a month, with no setup fee, no charge per dispute and no contract. It connects your Equifax, Experian and TransUnion reports through our monitoring partner, flags items that look inaccurate, incomplete, unverifiable or past the legal reporting window, and drafts a tailored FCRA letter for each item you choose to dispute. You mail the round yourself, or hand it to RushMail for a small per-letter fee, and we track each letter against the roughly 30-day investigation window.
In CreditRefresh’s September 18, 2026 member-data extract, 2.3% of disputed bureau-level items in mailed rounds had a recorded outcome. Within that subset, 47.9% were no longer reported on a newer pull of the same bureau, while 52.1% remained reported with a changed balance, status or negative flag.
An inquiry from an application you made is accurate, and we do not draft a dispute against it. It ages off on the bureaus’ schedule. For a pull you never authorized, the letter names the inquiry and the bureau showing it, and nothing goes out until you have read it and signed it.
It is backed by our 100% money-back guarantee: members who work the full program and see no bureau score rise above where they started can claim back every Refresh Monitoring payment. It is a refund promise, never a score promise.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do hard inquiries automatically fall off after 2 years?
Yes. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion take a hard inquiry off after two years as their own display practice, and FICO gives the same two-year figure (FICO, 2026). The FCRA itself requires a bureau to disclose credit-purpose inquiries for one year. If one is still showing after 24 months, ask the bureau showing it to remove it, and dispute it in writing if it stays.
Does your credit score go up when a hard inquiry drops off?
Not a FICO Score, at the two-year mark. FICO stops counting an inquiry after 12 months (FICO, 2026), so by the time it leaves the report at 24 months it has already been out of the FICO calculation for a year. VantageScore names no month at which an inquiry stops counting. How any score moves depends on the rest of the file.
Is 3 hard inquiries in a year bad?
FICO publishes no threshold, and the answer depends on the type. Three credit card applications are three FICO inquiries. Three mortgage or auto quotes inside FICO’s 45-day window count as one. FICO’s own figure for one additional inquiry is under five points, and a thin file feels each one more (FICO, 2026).
Does a denied application still leave a hard inquiry?
Yes. The report records the pull, and it does not record whether the lender said yes. A denial based on your report does give you something back: under 15 U.S.C. § 1681m the lender must send an adverse action notice naming the bureau and telling you that you may get a free copy of that report within 60 days and dispute anything wrong in it.
Can I remove a hard inquiry I authorized before the 2 years are up?
No. An inquiry tied to an application you made is accurate information, and the FCRA dispute process covers only information that is inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable. Only a pull made without your authorization or without a permissible purpose comes off early.
Can other lenders see my soft inquiries?
No. FICO states that soft inquiries are not visible to lenders who view your credit report and do not affect the score (FICO, 2026). They appear only on the copy you request yourself.
Does checking my own credit create a hard inquiry?
No. Checking your own report or score is a soft inquiry at any frequency, and it does not count in FICO’s new credit category.
CreditRefresh reads all three of your reports for the inquiry you never authorized and drafts the FCRA letter that challenges it, for you to review and sign. Backed by a 100% money-back guarantee.
