How To Remove Hard Inquiries From Your Credit Report
Your credit score is made up of five factors, including hard inquiries. We’ll explain the factors that make up your credit score, what a hard inquiry is, how to dispute credit inquiries, and how to improve your credit score.
Credit score factors
These five factors make up your credit score:
Payment history: 35%
Utilization: 30%
Length of credit history: 15%
Credit inquiries: 10%
Credit mix: 10%
What is a hard inquiry?
An inquiry is a credit check, when someone requests your credit report from one or more of the credit bureaus. There are two types of credit inquiries or credit checks, soft and hard.
A soft inquiry happens when you check your score on a site like Credit Sesame or Credit Karma. Or when you do things like shop for rates on a loan. Soft inquiries do not impact your credit score.
A hard inquiry, hard check, or hard pull happens when you apply for credit, a credit card, a loan, or when a potential landlord checks your credit. While shopping for loan rates doesn’t impact your credit, if you apply for one of the loans, it triggers a hard inquiry and does impact your credit.
The good news is that hard inquiries fall off your credit report after two years and only drop your score a few points. The danger of hard inquiries to your credit report is when you have several of them close together. Applying for a lot of credit in a short amount of time is a red flag to potential lenders that you may be having financial difficulty.
Removing authorized inquiries from your credit report
If you want to remove hard inquiries from your TransUnion, Equifax, or Experian credit report, but the inquiry is legitimate, there is no way to do it. The only way to remove a hard inquiry is to prove that it was the result of identify theft, someone who is not you but used your personal information to try and open a credit account.
The best hard inquiry removal letter details what happened but keeps it simple. There are also hard inquiry removal services, but they will charge you a fee and aren’t doing anything you can’t do yourself for free.
Ways to improve your credit score
Even if it were possible to remove legitimate hard inquiries from your credit report, doing so wouldn’t improve your credit score very much. There are much better ways to improve your credit score, like working with Upwardli!
Upwardli understands the unique challenges new arrivals to the U.S. can face when trying to navigate an unfamiliar personal finance system. Upwardli can help you build or improve your credit score. We also have lots of resources that will help you learn about the U.S. financial system and can help you find financial service providers that work with those who may not meet the typical requirements many providers have for customers.
