Originally Posted by sdsearch

Actually, it's at Citi that it might affect it. Citi has a limit of how many inquiries it will tolerate (on whichever bureau they pull) in the past 6 months. For some people it's no more than 6, for some people it may be a bit different.

So if you're maxing out Citi with 2 cards every 65 days, that's close to 6 in 6 months (it's 6 in about 6.25 months), if Citi pulls a consistent bureau*, and so you may get denied by Citi itself if you also apply for enough cards from other banks that pull from the same bureau. (While you'd be safe if the only other cards you apply for are from banks that pull some other bureau.)

*There used to a pattern where in some states, Citi would pull from bureau X early in the month while pulling from bureau Y late in the month. We developed a theory at FT that maybe Citi had a contract with bureau X for a cheap rate on the first NNNNN pulls in a month, but after they exceeded NNNNN pulls, that cheap rate expired for the month, and that point bureau Y was cheaper for the rest of the month. I have no idea if this is still going on. (Too many people assume pulls are as simple as this bureau in this state for this bank, and build databases on that, but it's not necessarily that simple.) But anyone doing Citi apps 8 days apart or 65 days apart could test it for their area presumably by doing the first app toward the end of a month and the subsequent app(s) right after the start of the next month. (However, since Citi didn't do this everywhere back when it did it, you couldn't extrapolate from just one or two reports whether Citi was still doing this anywhere or not. It would mostly only be data useful to you.)


Total pulls across all bureaus are irrelevant, since no bank with cards FTers are likely to be interested in pulls from all 3 bureaus for each card.

So to be useful, you need to break pulls on a per-bureau (EX vs EQ vs TU) basis. A bank will only count the pulls on the bureau that that bank pulls. (Of course, by pulling your actual credit report, they can separately count the number of cards you've actually opened and closed, if they wish, but that's different from pulls.)