Rate shopping for a loan without wrecking your credit score

Say you’ve got two mortgage quotes in hand, a third lender who wants to “run your numbers,” and a car dealer down the road offering to see what you qualify for. Each of those is a hard pull. The worry is obvious: five inquiries in two weeks sounds like exactly what a scoring model would punish.

It mostly won’t, if you shop the right way. FICO built specific rules so that comparing lenders on the same loan doesn’t look like a person frantically seeking credit. Those rules have edges, though, and people who don’t know them get caught.

The three rules FICO uses

FICO describes three separate protections for loan shopping. They stack.

myFICO also says each lender chooses which version of the formula the bureau uses. FICO’s consumer pages don’t spell out which specific versions fall under “older” and “newest,” so if you’re counting on the 45-day span, you’re counting on something you can’t confirm. Fourteen days works under either.

The 30-day buffer is the least understood of the three. It means that when a mortgage lender pulls your credit and then scores it right away, other mortgage inquiries you made in the prior 30 days aren’t counted at all. Only once they age past 30 days do they get grouped and counted as one.

Which loans get the treatment, and which don’t

FICO’s rate-shopping guide lists three loan types: mortgage, auto loan and student loan. Those are the purchases where comparing several lenders for one loan is normal behavior.

Credit cards are not on the list. FICO explains why: “if a credit report shows several consecutive credit card applications, the consumer might be seeking multiple new lines of credit.” Three card applications in a week are three inquiries.

Personal loans, apartment applications and phone contracts aren’t on FICO’s list either. Plan as though each of those counts separately.

VantageScore has its own rule. It says its models use “a 14-day rolling window” that treats multiple inquiries from mortgage or auto lenders as a single search for credit, and that it excludes utility inquiries entirely.

A worked shopping timeline

Example. You’re buying a car and want quotes from two outside lenders plus whatever the dealer can arrange.

Days 1 through 9 fall inside any 14-day span, so under both older and newer FICO versions they’re treated as one auto inquiry. The store card on Day 20 is its own inquiry under every version, because cards aren’t eligible.

Change one detail. If the online lender quote had come on Day 1 and the dealer on Day 40, the two would fall inside a 45-day span but not a 14-day span. A newer FICO version would group them. An older one would count two. That gap is the whole reason to keep shopping tight.

Dealer financing creates more inquiries than you expect

When a car dealer arranges financing, it often sends your application to several lenders at once. You may see four or five auto inquiries from the same afternoon, many from lenders you never heard of. Because they’re all auto inquiries inside a few hours, they fall well within the shopping window. They’re authorized, since you signed the credit application, so they aren’t something to dispute.

What the CFPB tells mortgage shoppers

The CFPB’s guidance is simpler: “Within a 45-day window, multiple credit checks from mortgage lenders are recorded on your credit report as a single inquiry.” Read that as a description of the scoring effect, not the report itself, because each lender’s pull will still be listed. The CFPB also points out that even if a later check falls outside the window, shopping around is usually still worth it because the effect of one more inquiry is small. A lower rate on a 30-year loan is worth far more than a few points for a few months. Our page on how your score changes your mortgage cost shows the size of that tradeoff.

How to shop and keep it to one inquiry

1. Pull your own reports first. That’s a soft inquiry, and it lets you fix errors before any lender looks.
2. Line up every lender you want to compare before the first pull, so the hard checks happen back to back.
3. Do all the hard pulls for one loan type within 14 days.
4. Don’t mix in other credit. Skip card applications, personal loans and store financing until the loan closes.
5. Keep a list of who pulled and when, so you can match each inquiry on your report to a lender you contacted.

For mortgages specifically, including how preapproval fits in and what happens if your house hunt runs long, see mortgage preapproval and credit pulls. For auto loans, credit scores and car loans covers what lenders look at beyond the inquiries.