In short, soft credit inquiries have no impact on your credit score, while hard credit inquiries can have a minor impact on your score. 

There are two types of soft credit inquiries – marketing pre-screen credit checks (pre-approval letters for financial products you receive in the mail) and consumer-initiated inquiries (checking your score through a credit bureau, checking your rate for a loan, etc.)

You’ll mainly come across hard credit inquiries when you submit an application for a line of credit or loan and when a lender pulls your credit report to determine if you qualify for said line of credit or loan.

If you’d like a more in-depth explanation of this topic, check out our article The Difference Between Hard and Soft Inquiries.