Is It Possible To Remove Hard Inquiries From Your Credit Report?

If you are a credit card user, you might be aware of the fact that ‘hard inquiries on your profile’ are one of the major factors that affect your credit score. Every time you apply for a credit card or a loan, your card issuer checks your credit report to get an idea about your creditworthiness. These credit report checks by authorized financial institutions are known as hard inquiries on your credit profile. These hard inquiries are mentioned on your credit report, and a lot of hard inquiries within a short time period might affect your credit score badly. Now, the question that arises is: Can you remove hard inquiries from credit report? We are here with this article to answer this question. Read on to know more:

Types of Inquiries on Your Credit Profile

There can be two types of inquiries on your credit profile, depending on who is checking your credit report. Following are the different types of inquiries that can be made on one’s credit profile:

Soft Inquiries

When you check your own credit report and score, it is known as a soft inquiry on your credit profile. A lot of individuals believe that checking their own credit reports can affect their credit score, but it is not at all true. Soft inquiries don’t affect your credit score in a negative or positive way. In fact, it is advisable for credit cardholders to check their credit reports regularly so that they might know what are mistakes they need to avoid in order to improve their credit score.

Hard Inquiries

As discussed earlier, hard inquiries are made on your profile when someone else (an authorized financial institution/bank) checks your credit report as a part of your credit card/loan application process. Hard inquiries affect your credit score in a slightly negative way, but a single hard inquiry will only drop your credit score by very few points. It may have a really bad impact on your credit score when you apply for too many credit cards within a short time period. So, you should consider waiting for a few months before applying for a credit card/loan if you have recently applied for one.

How  To Remove Hard Inquiries From Your Credit Report?

Can You Remove Hard Inquiries From Your Credit Report? Well, the answer to this question is: No! You can’t remove hard inquiries from your credit report until those are some fraudulent inquiries. If you did not apply for a credit card, but it has been mentioned on your credit report, you can get it removed, but not when you have applied for one. You need to think about the impact of hard inquiries on your credit score before applying for a credit card. Trying to remove a valid hard inquiry from your credit report is never a good idea.

Instead of finding ways to remove a hard inquiry from your report, you should try applying for fewer credit cards, that too with a decent gap of a few months. Moreover, you should not worry much about the hard inquiries on your credit report as these are automatically removed after a period of 1-2 years and don’t impact your credit score after that.

Bottom Line

You can get the hard inquiries removed from your credit report, but those are automatically removed after a few years and hence you don’t need to worry about the same. You should instead try to avoid applying for too many credit cards/loans within a short time period. One or two hard inquiries won’t affect your credit score much, but too many hard inquiries can. However, if any unauthorized hard inquiry is there on your credit report, you can contact the respective credit bureau to get it fixed. But, don’t expect that a valid hard inquiry will be removed from your credit report.

If you still have any doubts or queries regarding this topic, you can freely ask us in the comment section below!