An Enquiry Search is a soft search of your Credit Report, which may be carried out by a prospective lender, insurance provider, landlord, or employer to enable them to assess your financial standing and verify your identity.

Enquiry Searches typically reveal only your publicly available information – such as Electoral Roll listings, insolvencies, and CCJs – rather than your private credit account history. Searches that show both your private credit information and public information are hard searches known as Credit Application Searches.

How do I see my Enquiry Searches?

You can see your recorded Enquiry Searches by checking your Credit Report. Your Audit, Enquiry, and Credit Application Searches will be recorded in the ‘Searches’ section, where you’ll be able to see all searches performed on you in the last twelve months. You’ll be able to see the organisation that performed the search, the date it was performed, and your searched name and address.

Your Multi Agency Credit Report shows your complete information from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, letting you see everything that a lender can see.

You can try checkmyfile free for 30 days, then for just £14.99 per month, and cancel easily whenever you like.

Do Enquiry Searches affect my Credit Rating?

The two types of soft searches, Enquiry and Audit Searches, do not affect your Credit Rating or credit applications you make – they are logged mainly as a record of who has accessed your Credit Report, so you can monitor accesses of your information.

This means, in most cases, you can have lots of soft searches without worrying whether they’ll harm your chances of being accepted for credit.

A notable exception would be if you have an Enquiry Search recorded by a debt collection agency: lenders would likely see this as an indicator of risk, something they try to avoid as much as possible.

What can I do about an unrecognised Enquiry Search?

A recorded search represents a factual access of your Credit Report, so it’s not normally possible to dispute the entry.

If you spot an Enquiry Search that you don’t immediately recognise, don’t panic. The recorded organisation name may be a trading name or a finance provider for a service that you’ve enquired with previously.

While soft searches tend not to have any adverse influence on your creditworthiness, you can always contact the organisation that performed the Enquiry Search to find out why they accessed your information. They’ll then be able to advise you specifically on the search and you can request that they cease any further searches.