Hard Credit Inquiry

A hard credit inquiry occurs when a consumer applies for credit. A hard inquiry will also affect your credit score, but only minimally.

While hard credit inquiries impact both Vantage and FICO scores only minimally — especially when compared with other, more serious, scoring factors — each scoring model offers consumers a benefit not provided by the other when multiple inquiries appear on a credit report for a single type of credit transaction.

While both treat multiple inquiries posted within a focused period of time as a single inquiry, they differ in their "deduplication" methods, as:

• FICO uses a 45-day span, while Vantage uses 14 days.
• Vantage applies this special treatment across all types of credit (cards, autos, etc.), while FICO only applies it to mortgage, auto and student loans.

Again, hard inquiries don't have a major scoring impact, but when a score is just a couple of points lower than it needs to be to qualify for a mortgage, understanding the ways in which multiple inquiries are counted can be important.