What's the difference between a soft pull and a hard pull?
A soft pull is a credit check that doesn't affect your score and isn't visible to other lenders — covering things like checking your own credit, pre-approval offers, and the pulls CreditRefresh runs on your reports. A hard pull is a credit check tied to a credit application that does affect your score, usually by a small amount, and stays visible to lenders for two years.
The short version
The difference between a soft pull and a hard pull comes down to whether you're applying for credit. If you are, the lender runs a hard pull. If you aren't, any credit check that happens — by you, by a service you use, by a company offering you a pre-approval — is a soft pull.
The two work very differently on your file and your score.
What a soft pull does
A soft pull lets a person or company see your credit information without affecting your credit score. Soft pulls happen all the time, often without you doing anything:
- You check your own credit
- A credit card company runs a check to see if you qualify for a pre-approved offer
- Your bank reviews your credit during a periodic account review
- An employer runs a background check that includes your credit
- A landlord or insurance company runs a credit check as part of an application
- A platform like CreditRefresh pulls your reports to do dispute work
Soft pulls show up on your report when you view your own file, but lenders don't see them and they don't factor into your score in any model.
What a hard pull does
A hard pull, sometimes called a hard inquiry, happens when you formally apply for new credit. The lender or creditor asks one of the bureaus for your file as part of deciding whether to extend credit. Hard pulls show up on the bureau's version of your report and are visible to other lenders.
Hard pulls usually drop your score by a small amount — often around 5 points, sometimes less, occasionally more for thinner files. The effect fades over time. After a year, the impact on your score is generally minimal. After two years, the pull falls off your report entirely.
A few examples of things that trigger hard pulls:
- Applying for a credit card
- Applying for a mortgage or auto loan
- Applying for an apartment in some states
- Asking for a credit limit increase on certain cards
- Some "instant approval" offers when you proceed past the soft pre-qualification step
Rate-shopping windows
There's an important exception for mortgages, auto loans, and student loans. The FICO scoring models treat multiple hard inquiries for the same type of loan within a short window as a single inquiry. The window is typically 14 to 45 days depending on the model.
The reasoning is that consumers rate-shop these big loans, and the scoring shouldn't punish them for it. So if you apply for three auto loans in a two-week window, your score sees roughly the same impact as a single auto application.
This doesn't apply to credit cards. Each credit card application is treated as a separate hard pull.
How long each stays on your report
Soft pulls only appear on the version of your report you personally pull. They don't appear to other lenders and they have no score impact.
Hard pulls stay visible on your report for two years. The score impact is heaviest in the first few months and fades after that. After two years, the pull is gone.
Why the distinction matters for disputes
Unauthorized hard pulls are a common item to dispute. If a hard inquiry shows up on your report from a company you don't recognize, or from a credit application you didn't make, it may be:
- Identity theft — someone applied for credit in your name
- A reporting error — a soft pull that was incorrectly logged as a hard pull
- An expired authorization — a creditor pulled your credit outside the scope of what you authorized
Hard pulls you didn't authorize are disputable under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. CreditRefresh flags them when they appear on your reports and drafts dispute letters for each one. Soft pulls don't get disputed because they don't affect your score and aren't visible to lenders in the first place.
What CreditRefresh's pulls count as
Every report pull CreditRefresh runs on your behalf is a soft pull. You can run scans as often as the platform schedules them without worrying about a score impact from the pulls themselves. The work the platform does on your reports — finding errors, drafting letters, getting items corrected — is what moves the score over time. The pulls don't.
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The standard FICO credit score is built from five factors: payment history (35%), credit utilization (30%), length of credit history (15%), credit mix (10%), and new credit (10%). Payment history and utilization together account for two-thirds of the score, which is why disputing inaccurate late payments and incorrect balances tends to move scores the most.
At minimum, once a year per bureau — and right now you can pull free reports weekly from all three bureaus at annualcreditreport.com. Annual review catches errors before they hit major applications. Step up to monthly during active dispute work, and every two weeks after identity theft. CreditRefresh also pulls automatically.
Yes. CreditRefresh treats credit and personal data as sensitive by default. Bureau pulls are soft inquiries that don't affect your score. Credentials are encrypted, used only for dispute work. Your data isn't sold to advertisers or third parties — it stays in our systems for finding errors, drafting letters, and tracking outcomes.
CreditRefresh is an app that uses AI to find errors and FCRA violations on your credit reports, then drafts custom dispute letters to Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. It pulls your reports automatically, flags inaccurate balances, outdated items, and reporting that violates federal law, and tracks each bureau's 30-day response. You approve every letter before it's sent.