Home / Straight Answers / Credit enquiries

Straight Answers · Bank said no

How many credit enquiries is too many?

Bayley Clarke · Mortgage broker on the road · Last checked 3 September 2026 · 4 min read

The one minute version. The rest of this page is the detail underneath it.

The enquiries that don't matter much

If you're applying for a mortgage every month because you've got significant equity in your property and you're buying a new property every single month, your credit enquiry amount really isn't going to matter. You're applying for secured credit in the form of a residential mortgage. So it doesn't really impact your score.

A home loan enquiry tells the next lender you're doing something ordinary with your credit file. It's secured against a property, it's the kind of debt the banks like, and an investor with six of them in a year reads as an investor, not a risk. Same for a refinance enquiry or two. Context is everything, and a mortgage is good context.

The enquiries that do

As you start to go down the risk curve, looking at applying for car loans every month, and then even further, things like personal loans, payday loans and very high interest debt, that's where it changes. If you're continuing to make enquiries every week, every month on those, that's going to significantly impact your score and your ability for the banks to approve you for a home loan, because they're going to see you as too high risk.

It's the pattern, not any one enquiry. A single car loan enquiry is nothing. A car loan, two personal loans and a buy now pay later provider in the same quarter tells the bank you're leaning on credit to get by, and that's the story it reads regardless of your income. Payday lenders are the worst of it. One enquiry there can put you outside some lenders' policy on its own.

What the banks' own rulebooks say about the number

Almost nobody publishes a number. Across the current panel I can find exactly one written cap, and it belongs to a specialist lender, not a major: more than six finance enquiries in twelve months and they want a written explanation before they'll look at the file. Every other lender runs your file through a scorecard, and enquiries are one input in it. The majors don't publish the cut-off score either, so nobody outside the bank can tell you the line.

So the honest answer is that the count isn't the thing. The type is. A run of home loan enquiries reads as someone buying property, which is secured lending against a house. A run of credit card, personal loan and buy now pay later enquiries in the same window reads as someone short on cash, and the scorecard treats it that way, because that's the pattern that turns into missed repayments.

What I do before we apply anywhere: pull the report, count what's actually on it, and if there's a cluster of enquiries we write the story once, up front, in the application notes. A cluster with a story gets assessed. A cluster with no story gets assumed.

What the bank actually looks at

There's no real answer for how many is too many. It just depends on what type of lending you're applying for, how that affects your overall score, and what the bank will actually look at when they're approving you. And what they look at is the whole file: enquiries, yes, but also repayment history, open accounts, limits and anything unpaid.

So for you that means the enquiries are usually explainable if they came with a story. Shopping three lenders for one car loan in the same fortnight reads as one decision. Six unrelated enquiries over six months doesn't. If you're planning to buy in the next year, the simplest move is to stop applying for anything until the home loan is done. And if the enquiries are already there, tell me before we lodge, because the story goes in the application, not after the decline. The credit score page covers what the number itself means.