Who Checked My Credit? How to See Soft and Hard Inquiries

If you’re asking “who checked my credit?”, the answer is in your own credit reports. Pull your reports from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion and look at the inquiries section of each one. Every company that requested your report shows up there, by name and date. Hard inquiries (from applications) and soft inquiries (from things like account reviews and pre-screened offers) are listed separately, and the soft ones are only visible to you.

You can get those reports free. The rest of this post is about reading them, which is where most people get stuck, because the names in the inquiry section often look nothing like the company you actually dealt with.

Step 1: Get all three reports, not just one

Go to AnnualCreditReport.com, the only site authorized by federal law to provide your free reports from all three bureaus. The bureaus made free weekly online reports permanent in 2023, so there’s no need to ration them.

Pull all three. Inquiries are recorded at the bureau that was actually pulled, so a car dealer who checked your Experian file won’t show up on your TransUnion report at all. If you only look at one, you can miss the inquiry you’re hunting for.

Credit monitoring apps also show inquiries, but usually from one or two bureaus and usually only the hard ones. For a full answer to “who checked my credit,” the reports themselves are the source.

Step 2: Find the inquiries section

Each bureau formats its report differently, but they all split inquiries into two groups. The labels vary. You might see “Hard inquiries” and “Soft inquiries,” or “Regular inquiries” and “Promotional, account review and other inquiries,” or wording along the lines of inquiries “shared with others” and inquiries “shared only with you.”

That last way of putting it is the most honest description of the difference. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, your report must identify each person or company that procured it during the previous year (two years for employment purposes). You see all of them. Lenders who pull your report later see only the hard ones. As the CFPB puts it, soft inquiries are shown only to you when you review your own report.

Step 3: Sort what you see

Most entries fall into a handful of familiar types.

A few patterns trip people up.

The car dealer cluster. You applied once at a dealership and now there are five or six lender names on your report from the same afternoon. That’s normal. Dealers shop your application across their lending partners. For FICO scores, multiple auto loan inquiries in a short window count as a single inquiry, so the damage is much smaller than it looks. If you’re curious about the dealer side, we wrote about how dealers use soft-pull pre-qualification to avoid the cluster entirely.

The name you don’t recognize. Many inquiries are logged under a parent company, a bank that issues cards for a store brand, or a reseller that pulls reports on behalf of a smaller business. A store card might show up under the issuing bank’s name. A landlord’s screening might show up under the screening company. Before assuming fraud, search the name along with “credit inquiry” and think back over the dates.

Promotional inquiries from everyone. Those soft entries from lenders you’ve never contacted are pre-screened offers. Lenders buy lists of people who meet certain criteria. It’s legal, it doesn’t affect your score, and you can opt out (more on that below).

How much do inquiries actually matter?

Not much, in most cases. According to myFICO, hard inquiries stay on your report for up to two years but only affect FICO scores for the first year, and a single additional inquiry typically costs fewer than five points. Soft inquiries don’t affect scores at all.

Rate shopping is protected, too. FICO ignores mortgage, auto and student loan inquiries from the 30 days before scoring, and groups multiple inquiries for the same kind of loan within a shopping window into one. Our full breakdown of soft pulls vs. hard pulls covers the details.

So a hard inquiry you expected is rarely worth worrying about. The one worth worrying about is the hard inquiry you didn’t authorize.

Can someone check my credit without my permission?

Not legally, unless they have what the FCRA calls a permissible purpose. That includes:

• You applied with them for credit, a lease, insurance or another business transaction
• You’re an existing customer and they’re reviewing or collecting on your account
• You gave them written permission
• Certain government, court and child support purposes
• Pre-screened offers, under tightly limited rules

What isn’t allowed is curiosity, snooping, or anything meant to harass you. An ex, a nosy neighbor or a former business partner can’t legally pull your credit just because they want to know. Our post on whether it’s legal to look up someone’s credit goes through the edge cases, and permissible purpose under the FCRA has the full list. It’s a plain-English summary, not legal advice; if an unauthorized pull has cost you money, a consumer attorney can tell you what your options are.

A lot of legitimate checks don’t come with any notice to you, and that’s by design. Soft-pull services, including ours, don’t notify the person being looked up and don’t affect their score. What they do require is that whoever runs the lookup has a valid reason, most often the person’s own OK, and our users confirm that reason every time. If you think someone looked you up through our service without one, tell us through our compliance page and we’ll look into it.

When “who checked my credit” turns up a stranger

Work through it in this order.

1. Rule out the boring explanations. Check the date against your calendar. Did you apply for anything, shop for a car, rent an apartment, set up a utility, or switch phone plans around then? Phone carriers and utilities sometimes check credit when you open service.

2. Contact the company. Call the company named in the inquiry, explain you don’t recognize it, and ask what it was for. If it was a reseller or screening company, it can usually tell you which client ran it.

3. Dispute it with the bureau. If the inquiry is inaccurate or you didn’t authorize it, dispute it with the bureau that shows it. The CFPB explains how to dispute errors, and it’s free.

4. Look for other signs of identity theft. An unauthorized hard inquiry is often the first visible step of someone trying to open credit in your name. Check the accounts section of all three reports for anything you didn’t open. If you find something, report it at IdentityTheft.gov, the FTC’s recovery site, which builds a recovery plan for you.

5. Freeze your credit. A freeze stops new creditors from pulling your report, which shuts down most new-account fraud. It’s free at all three bureaus, it doesn’t affect your score, and you can lift it temporarily when you need to apply for something. If you’re weighing a freeze against the lock products the bureaus also sell, see credit freeze vs. credit lock.

How to cut down on soft inquiries

If the promotional inquiries bother you, you can opt out of pre-screened offers at OptOutPrescreen.com or by calling 1-888-5-OPT-OUT. Opting out online lasts five years; mailing in the signed form makes it permanent. It won’t stop account reviews from companies you already do business with, and it won’t stop inquiries you authorize. Our walkthrough on opting out of pre-screened credit offers covers what changes and what doesn’t.

If you’re the one doing the checking

Landlords, lenders, contractors and small businesses run credit checks every day, and the rules above apply to them in reverse. Get a permissible purpose for every lookup. The simplest one is the person’s OK in writing, and a text message or an email is enough. Keep that record. Use a soft pull when you’re only pre-qualifying, so you aren’t putting a hard inquiry on someone’s file before they’ve decided to apply.

That’s how our lookups work: you enter a phone number, confirm your reason, and get back the person’s name, current address and FICO® Score 4 from TransUnion as a soft pull. The person isn’t notified and their score doesn’t change. Our FAQ covers the common questions, and if you’re new to reading reports, the difference between a credit report and a credit score is a good place to start.

One last tip: put a reminder on your calendar to pull your three reports every few months. It takes ten minutes, it’s free, and an inquiry you catch in week two is a lot easier to deal with than one you find in month nine.