 TITLE: Do Multiple Loan Inquiries Affect Your Credit Score? CONTENT: Inquiries Are Minimally Important to Credit Scores\n--------------------------------------------------\nThe reason any type of information in your credit report may factor into your credit score is its indication of credit risk. Taking on multiple new credit obligations in a short period of time indicates possible financial distress and elevated credit risk, which is why hard inquiries can impact your scores. That said, hard inquiries do not always impact your scores and are never the sole reason for a low score or being declined for credit.\nWhen you compare the influence of inquiries with the influence of the other credit scoring categories, you will see that the consideration of inquiries is the least important aspect of your credit reports. They just aren't that important to your scores.\nIn credit scoring systems developed by FICO®, hard inquiries fall into a category called New Credit, which is the least influential category of its credit score metrics. This category, which includes more than just the consideration of hard inquiries, accounts for 10% of the points in your FICO® Scores☉ . In VantageScore's credit scores, hard inquiries are considered to be \"less influential.\" So even if you have a few inquiries on your credit reports, there are many other more important and influential aspects upon which to focus, such as paying your bills on time and avoiding too much credit card debt. Consumers do not have low scores simply because of credit inquiries.\nIt's important to note, however, how the FICO® scoring models treat credit card inquiries. FICO®'s consumer-friendly logic that ignores loan inquiries less than 30 days old and consolidates multiple loan inquiries that are within 45 days of each other does _not_ apply to credit card inquiries. For example, if you have six credit card inquiries on your Experian credit report that are all less than 12 months old, they will be counted as six hard inquiries in the FICO® scoring process. END