 TITLE: Do Multiple Loan Inquiries Affect Your Credit Score? CONTENT: How Do Inquiries for Mortgages, Auto Loans and Other Loans Impact Your Credit Score?\n------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nHard credit inquiries, like other information on your credit reports, are seen by the major consumer credit scoring models, FICO® and VantageScore®. Having multiple hard inquiries within a short period of time can be predictive of credit risk, so having too many inquiries for different types of credit can result in a lower credit score.\nWhile all hard inquiries resulting from loan applications were once considered separate events by credit scoring models, that hasn't been the case for many years. FICO® and VantageScore have evolved in their treatment of multiple inquiries as a way to avoid unfairly penalizing a consumer for being a smart rate shopper.\nIn the contemporary versions of FICO®'s credit scores, for example, hard inquiries related to mortgage, auto loan and student loan applications are entirely ignored for 30 days from the date of the inquiry. So if you settle on a loan during that 30-day time period, your scores will not be affected by inquiries.\nAfter those inquiries have aged past 30 days, they still may not be counted as independent inquiries by credit scoring models. That's because FICO® considers similar loan-related inquiries that have occurred within 45 days of each other as a single inquiry in the scoring process.\nFor example, if you shopped around for an auto loan with five different lenders over a period of 45 days, FICO® would consider those five hard inquiries as one hard inquiry for credit scoring purposes. This is because the inquiries all occurred within 45 days of each other, and FICO® understands that you were rate-shopping for one loan, not five loans.\nIn VantageScore's credit scoring systems, all hard inquiries that occur within 14 days of each other are considered as one inquiry for the scoring process. This applies to all hard inquiries, regardless of the lender. END