A soft credit pull is a review of your credit report that happens outside a formal loan application, and it has no effect on your credit score no matter how often it occurs. Checking your own score, receiving a pre-approved credit card offer, applying for insurance, or being screened by an employer all generate soft inquiries. The pull is recorded on your report, but every major scoring model ignores it.
What Counts as a Soft Pull
Soft inquiries happen more often than most people realize. The most common one is checking your own credit through a bank app, budgeting tool, or credit monitoring service. You can do that daily without consequence.
Credit card issuers and insurance companies run soft pulls when they screen consumers for the pre-approved offers that show up in your mailbox. Employers sometimes pull a version of your credit report during hiring to evaluate financial responsibility. Utility companies and phone carriers run soft pulls when you apply for new service; if your report shows missed payments, the provider may require a security deposit rather than turning you away.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act limits who can look at your credit and why. Any party pulling your report needs what the law calls a “permissible purpose,” which covers reviewing an existing account, underwriting insurance, evaluating a job applicant, or making a firm offer of credit.
Soft Pulls Versus Hard Pulls
The distinction matters because hard inquiries can lower your score and soft ones cannot. A hard pull happens when you formally apply for credit: a mortgage, an auto loan, a credit card, a personal loan. You are telling a lender you want to borrow money, and the scoring models treat that as a risk signal. A soft pull happens when nobody is deciding whether to lend you money right now.
According to FICO, a single hard inquiry typically drops your score by five points or less. Hard inquiries stay on your report for two years, though most scoring models only factor them in for the first twelve months. Soft inquiries also remain on your report for up to two years, but they never enter the score calculation.
Why Soft Pulls Don’t Affect Your Score
Both FICO and VantageScore models skip soft inquiries entirely. You could have dozens of them on your report and your score would not move. Scoring models are built to predict the risk that you will fall behind on debt payments, and a soft pull does not represent any attempt to take on new debt.
The design is deliberate. If checking your own score could lower it, people would avoid monitoring their credit, and that would lead to more missed errors, more undetected identity theft, and worse financial outcomes. The bureaus and scoring companies want you to check often.
When a Soft Pull Becomes a Hard Pull
Pre-qualification and pre-approval offers use soft pulls to screen you, but accepting the offer and submitting a formal application triggers a hard pull. This catches people off guard. A mailer says you are pre-approved for a credit card, and you assume the credit check already happened. It did, but only the soft version. The lender still needs to verify your full credit profile before issuing the card, and that second look is a hard inquiry.
Mortgage pre-qualification works the same way. A lender may run a soft pull to give you a ballpark estimate of what you qualify for. When you move to formal pre-approval and start submitting tax returns, pay stubs, and bank statements, the lender runs a hard pull. The soft-to-hard transition happens the moment you authorize a lender to make an actual lending decision.
Rentals, Utilities, and Insurance
Rental applications are a gray area. Whether a landlord runs a hard or soft pull depends on the screening service they use. Third-party tenant screening companies almost always run hard inquiries, while landlords checking your credit directly may only generate a soft pull. If you are submitting several rental applications, ask each landlord which type of check they use before you authorize it.
Insurance companies routinely pull your credit when calculating premiums, and those are soft inquiries. Utility companies opening new service accounts do the same. Neither scenario involves you requesting a loan, so neither affects your score. If a utility company finds concerning information in your report, the typical consequence is a required deposit rather than a denial of service.
Who Can See Soft Inquiries
Soft inquiries appear on your credit report, but visibility is limited. Only you can see the complete list when you pull your own report. Companies within the same industry can see soft inquiries related to their industry: an insurance company checking your credit can see other insurance-related soft inquiries, but not soft inquiries from credit card prescreening or employer checks. Regardless of who can see any given soft inquiry, none of them factor into your score.
Both soft and hard inquiries drop off automatically after two years. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires the bureaus to disclose the record of inquiries from non-consumer-initiated credit and insurance transactions made in the preceding year, so when you request your own report you will see a full accounting of who has looked at your credit and why.
Opting Out of Prescreened Offers
The pre-approved credit card and insurance offers in your mailbox come from soft pulls that lenders run on large batches of consumers. If you would rather not receive them, the FCRA gives you the right to opt out. You can stop prescreened offers for five years at OptOutPrescreen.com or by calling 1-888-567-8688. To opt out permanently, you start online or by phone and then sign and return a Permanent Opt-Out Election form. Requests are processed within five days, though it may take a few weeks before the offers stop arriving.
Opting out prevents the bureaus from including your name on the lists they provide to companies making firm offers. It does not affect your ability to apply for credit on your own, and it does not change your score. You can opt back in at any time.
Checking Your Own Credit
Federal law entitles you to a free copy of your credit report from each of the three major bureaus every twelve months. All three bureaus have also made weekly free reports permanently available through AnnualCreditReport.com. Equifax is offering six free reports per year through 2026 at the same site. Every one of these self-checks is a soft inquiry.
The only authorized site for free annual reports is AnnualCreditReport.com, or you can call 1-877-322-8228. Checking regularly is the easiest way to catch errors, spot unauthorized hard inquiries, and track your progress if you are working to build or rebuild your credit. Since none of these checks affect your score, there is no reason not to look a few times a year.