What Are Soft Inquiries?

If you’ve ever checked your credit score or signed up for a financial app, you may have triggered something called a soft inquiry. What are soft inquiries, exactly, and how do they affect your credit?

Learning what soft inquiries are and how they differ from hard credit checks can help you feel more confident about monitoring your credit. This article unpacks the question, “What are soft inquiries?” and covers some practical tips for working toward a stronger score.

What are soft inquiries?

Soft inquiries occur whenever a person or company reviews your credit report without evaluating you for new credit. Common examples of soft inquiries include:

• Checking your own credit report or score
• Background checks by prospective employers
• Pre-qualification or pre-approval offers for credit cards or loans 
• Credit monitoring by banks or financial apps

Soft inquiries are considered informational, which means they don’t hurt your score. However, if you run a soft check to see if you’re eligible for a loan product or line of credit, you’ll have to authorize a hard check to take the offer. 

Why don’t soft inquiries impact your credit score?

Soft inquiries don’t affect your credit score because they aren’t tied to new borrowing behavior. Credit-scoring models focus on actions that signal risk, such as:

• Numerous hard inquiries 
• Applying for new credit
• Opening multiple accounts in a short period
• Increasing your total debt

A soft inquiry doesn’t involve a lending decision. You can’t use it to take out a loan or open a new credit card, so scoring models don’t penalize you for it. That’s why checking your own credit or running soft checks is completely safe. 

The difference between a soft inquiry and a hard inquiry 

The primary difference between the two types of credit checks lies in whether they’re connected to an application for a new line of credit or a loan product. If you authorize a lender to pull your credit as part of an application process, it will show up on your report as a hard inquiry. 

By contrast, a soft inquiry happens when your credit is reviewed for informational purposes only. It's not visible to lenders and doesn’t affect your score. 

Running a hard inquiry will impact your credit. Typically, your score will drop by about three points. Fortunately, you have a window after each hard credit inquiry where you can apply for options with multiple lenders to compare rates. This window ranges from 14 to 45 days, depending on the type of loan product.

Keep in mind that the grace period only applies when you’re applying for the same type of product. For example, you can apply for auto loan rates with several different lenders to find the best option for you. In this scenario, you’ll only be penalized for one hard inquiry as long as all of the checks occur within the specified window. 

How to build credit

Building credit requires consistent, positive behavior over time. Here are a few things to focus on:

• Make payments on time
• Keep balances low relative to your credit limits
• Maintain active accounts
• Avoid unnecessary hard inquiries

Taking advantage of tools that allow you to monitor your credit or build payment history can help you achieve your goals. For example, many credit-building platforms let you sign up with no hard inquiry. Kikoff is one such tool. You can use it to report positive activity like on-time rent payments.

Conclusion

If you’re working to understand or build your credit, soft inquiries are nothing to fear. In fact, they’re often an important part of staying informed and developing stronger financial habits.

Now that you know that soft pulls don’t harm your credit, it’s time to put that knowledge to work. Kikoff is a free credit-building tool that includes payment reporting and other useful features. Get credit for the payments you already have with Kikoff.