How long hard inquiries stay on your report and keep counting

Someone pulls their report before a car or home loan, finds a hard inquiry from a year and a half ago, and assumes it’s still dragging the score down. It isn’t, at least not on a FICO Score. The entry is still there, but the scoring formula stopped looking at it months ago.

Hard inquiries run on two separate clocks. Mixing them up leads people to wait longer than they need to, or to dispute accurate entries out of frustration.

The two clocks, in FICO’s words

myFICO puts it in one sentence: “Hard inquiries stay on the report for up to two years, but they only affect the FICO Scores for a year.” Equifax gives the same two-year figure for its reports and says inquiries tend to affect scores for about one year.

The middle row is the one that confuses people. In year two, an inquiry is a historical note. It costs you nothing in FICO’s math, but a human underwriter can still read it.

VantageScore frames recovery differently. It says the score effect of an inquiry “can be made up in as little as three months.” That’s a statement about how quickly the score tends to rebound, not about when the inquiry leaves the report.

A worked example with real dates

Example. Say you applied for an auto loan on March 10, 2026, and the lender pulled your Experian report.

• March 10, 2026: The inquiry posts to your Experian file. FICO Scores built on Experian data can count it.
• Around March 10, 2027: It passes 12 months old. FICO Scores stop counting it, even though it still appears on the report.
• Around March 10, 2028: It reaches two years and drops off the report.

Now say you’re planning a mortgage application for June 2027. By then the auto inquiry will be about 15 months old: still visible, no longer scored by FICO. If you’re also deciding whether to apply for a new card in January 2027, the math changes. That card inquiry would still be inside FICO’s 12-month window when your mortgage gets scored five months later.

That’s the practical use of the two clocks. You can’t control the past inquiries, but you can see exactly when each one goes quiet, and time new applications so they don’t overlap with a big one.

Why your own report may show more than an app does

Different sources show different time spans. myFICO says that on credit reports from myFICO, “inquiries are only shown for 12 months,” which lines up with the scoring window. The full report from the bureau itself, such as the free weekly reports at AnnualCreditReport.com, can show inquiries up to two years old.

Your own copy also lists soft inquiries, such as prescreened offers and account reviews. Those never count, at any age, and lenders can’t see them. When you’re counting what matters, count hard inquiries only, and only those under a year old for FICO purposes.

Year-two inquiries still come up in mortgage underwriting

A scoring model ignoring an inquiry doesn’t mean an underwriter will. Fannie Mae’s Selling Guide tells lenders using Desktop Underwriter that they “should examine inquiries to determine whether they represent potential sources of undisclosed credit.” If the report shows you applied for something, the lender wants to know whether you got it and whether that debt is on your application.

Lenders commonly ask for a short written explanation of recent inquiries. A good one names the creditor, the date, what you applied for, and whether an account was opened. If it was, the lender will want that payment counted in your debt-to-income ratio. If you were declined or didn’t proceed, say so. Our 12-month mortgage readiness plan folds this into the timeline.

What you can and can’t do about the clock

You can’t legitimately shorten the clock on an inquiry you authorized. The FCRA’s dispute process requires a bureau to delete or correct information that is inaccurate, incomplete or can’t be verified (15 U.S.C. 1681i). An accurate inquiry from an application you made doesn’t fit any of those, and disputing it as if it does is a misuse of the process that tends to waste a month and change nothing.

What you can do:

1. List every hard inquiry on all three reports with its date and bureau.
2. Mark the date each one turns 12 months old and the date it turns 24 months old.
3. Hold optional applications until the inquiries you care about have aged past 12 months, if a big application is near.
4. Look closely at any inquiry you don’t recognize. That one may be disputable, and it may point to fraud. The steps are in removing inquiries you didn’t authorize.

If you’d rather not keep the list by hand, the free inquiry tracker builds the calendar for you from each inquiry date. For the size of the effect while an inquiry is still counting, see how much a hard inquiry affects your score.