Does checking my own credit score lower it?

No. Checking your own credit is a "soft inquiry" and has zero effect on your score, no matter how often you do it. Only "hard inquiries" — when a lender pulls your credit to approve new borrowing — can ding your score, and only slightly.

This myth quietly keeps people from doing the one thing that actually helps: watching their own credit. Pulling your report through a free service, your bank, or annualcreditreport.com is a soft inquiry — invisible to lenders and harmless to your score. What causes the small, temporary dip people worry about is a hard inquiry, which happens when you apply for a card, loan, or mortgage, and even that usually costs only a few points and fades within a year. Checking your own credit regularly is how you catch errors, spot accounts you don't recognize, and see collections early — all of which protect your score rather than hurt it.

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