Does applying for a credit card hurt your score?

Applying for a credit card does hurt your credit score, but only temporarily. Any time you apply for new credit, whether that’s a bank loan or a credit card, the lender does a hard inquiry into your credit history. The inquiry stays on your credit report for two years and can cause a dip in your score for up to 12 months. In most cases, your score should only drop a few points and rebound within 3-6 months. But if there are numerous hard inquiries added to your report in a short period of time, the damage will be greater and last longer. 

And if you’re worried that applying for a new credit card will hurt your credit, there are ways to minimize the damage.

What you should know about applying for a new credit card:

• The fewer credit accounts you have and the shorter your credit history is, the more a hard inquiry will affect your score.
• It doesn’t matter whether the hard credit pull results in a denial or acceptance. The inquiry will cause some slight damage either way.
• The more hard inquiries there are within a short timeframe, the more your score will fall.
• If you’re worried about inquiries hurting your score, it makes sense to time them so as to immediately precede your application for a mortgage or auto loan.

While applying for a new credit card does hurt your credit score, it’s usually not enough of a drop to worry about. Using your new card responsibly should quickly help your score recover and go higher than it was before. You just don’t want to apply for several new cards at once or risk a hard inquiry right before another important loan application.

Yes, it does, slightly and for a couple of months. Any credit card application (except for preapproved offers) does that. Just do not apply for too many cards in a short period of time and target your efforts wisely. Check your score and make sure you are in the right bracket. Good luck!

When you apply for a new credit card, the bank pulls your credit report, and that does ding your credit score a little. The good news is that it rebounds in a few months.

Yeah, since you'll get a hard inquiry. It's not that big of a deal though, maybe like 5-10 points. Of course, that number will start to stack up if you keep applying to several credit cards too close to each other.