Experian is in the credit reporting industry in the United States for credit reports and scores, and it operates alongside Equifax and TransUnion credit bureaus. Several companies provide credit reports that contain information about the consumer's borrowing and their capacity to pay back the borrowed amount. This brings up an important question: Does requesting your credit report or credit score from Experian constitute a hard credit pull? Let's analyze this in detail.
What does it mean to run a Credit Check? A credit check or credit inquiry enables creditors, lenders, or other legally entitled persons to access your credit report. The two basic classifications that exist for credit checks are known as the soft credit check and the hard credit check. Thus, soft credit checks, also known as soft inquiries have no bearing on the credit score of a person. While hard inquiries do not have a significant impact on your credit score they do have a small negative effect on this score.
Soft Credit Checks Soft inquiry refers to a scenario where you request your credit report or third parties such as businesses review your credit report for reasons that are not credit granting.
Soft inquiries include:
- Standard: Verifying the credit check you have done
- Employer’s prescreening
- Pre-qualification from lenders
- The key challenge that users face is to get approved for promotional offers.
Such types of inquiries are not detrimental to your credit score; thus, they are soft inquiries. Some things like job or insurance screenings may pull your credit, but these pulls do not display on your credit report.
Hard Credit Inquiries Anytime you ask for new credit like credit cards, personal loans, or mortgages among others, the credit reporting agency runs a hard credit check. These are typically known as hard inquiries and are visible to others on your credit report, and may lead to a decrease in your credit score by as much as five to ten points on average. The impact is always less or low until and unless you have applied for many lines of credit in some period.
Do Experian credit checks trigger hard inquiries? A hard credit check is usually carried out when you apply for credit or when a company wants to verify your credit status before offering you its products or services.
The answer is No. Here are some common Experian products and services that only result in a soft inquiry:
Experian credit reports and credit scores are used to refer to this Report. The most important service that Experian offers is the possibility to check your credit report and credit score with Vantage 3. 0 at any given moment. Here, if you are a consumer and you buy your credit report directly from the Experian website or the Experian mobile app, they only pull a soft credit inquiry. When you check your credit report you make a soft search with all three credit reference agencies. In this way, you can always check your Experian credit report often without it having any negative effect on your credit scores.
Experian Boost Experian Boost allows consumers to enhance their scores, by submitting positive payment history from telecoms and utilities. Soft inquiry is made when you enroll for the Boost program and when linking accounts, Experian will do a soft inquiry. The Boost program does not make any hard pulls during registration, and it doesn’t pull data during the monthly update of the Boost connection. It does not impact your credit scores; this is a common misconception that people have when it comes to credit scores.
Experian IdentityWorks IdentityWorks is a range of services within the company Experian that offers identity theft protection and credit monitoring. Signing up for their platform does not trigger any hard pulls. It just performs periodic soft checks to act as a watchful eye in your Experian credit file for any malicious activities and notify you as needed. Account monitoring of this kind of inquiry known as soft inquiries does not hurt your score in any way.
Other Experian Soft Inquiries Here are some other common scenarios that result in only a soft inquiry with Experian:
- To avail of your rights as provided by law, the said credit reporting agencies should allow you to request for a free annual credit report.
- Applying for CreditMatch and Credit Advisor comparison tools with Experian
- Registering at Experian. com and then go into the credit monitoring section
- The ability to receive notification whenever there are alternations made to your Experian credit file
That way, if you are buying your credit reports, if you are tracking your credit, or simply if you are checking your score, Experian will not request a hard credit check.
Why Credit Checks Matter The reason why the type of credit check is important is that sometimes several hard inquiries within a short period will result in a reduction in credit scores. Overall, the high frequency of hard inquiries makes the consumer look like an undesirable candidate for new credit lines since they must be in a difficult financial situation or over-extended. It leads to a somewhat lower score of this view.
All the checks that you have done through Experian in your credit reports and credit scores are soft inquiries and they do not in any way affect your credit rating. Soft inquiries themselves also do not have a maximum number. While soft inquiries do not affect your credit scores or reports at all, hard inquiries can remain on your credit reports for up to two years and cause a temporary decrease in your credit scores.
The only time this happens is if you want to apply for any of the Experian financial products such as loans or credit cards featured on their website. When you submit credit applications to lenders which may include applying for a credit card, it may also lead to a hard inquiry to determine your rates. Despite soft searches, all direct inquiries to Experian will never lead to hard pull.
Key Takeaways Yet, it does not harm your credit if you check your Experian credit score and buy credit scores from Experian.com. Inquiries of these kinds will not in any way lower your scores or harm your credit position in any way. Therefore, you can freely use your Experian credit report to track your identity theft and to pay attention to your latest rating in the eyes of lenders. It assists in attaining the scores one deserves for being informed on the credit that is being taken.
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