 TITLE: What Is a Soft Inquiry? CONTENT: How Do Soft Inquiries Impact Credit Scores?\n-------------------------------------------\nCredit scoring models generate your credit score by analyzing the information in your credit report. Soft inquiries don't have any impact on your credit scores.\nHard inquiries may remain in your credit reports for about two years and they can impact your credit scores. But the impact is typically small, and credit scores tend to rebound within a few months if no new negative information gets added to your credit report. Scoring models usually only consider hard inquiries from the previous 12 months when calculating your scores.\nMultiple recent hard inquiries can do more damage to your credit scores. However, credit scoring models often combine (or \"deduplicate\") multiple inquiries from a 14- to 45-day period—depending on the type of credit score—to avoid punishing consumers who are rate shopping. END