Yesterday Points With A Crew posted an article titled ‘Uh oh? Just declined for a Barclaycard card for “Too many cards opened in the last 24 months”‘ and there was some speculation that Barclaycard might have implemented a new rule similar to Chase’s 5/24 rule that would auto deny you if you’d opened too many accounts in the last 24 months. Barclaycard hasn’t introduced a new rule and this is something Barclaycard has been doing for some time (denying people with too many new cards in the last 24 months).
The reason that 24 months is somewhat significant is that inquiries for new credit stay on your credit report for a period of two years (or 24 months) so it’s easy for card issuers to look at this number (interestingly Chase bases their rule on the number of accounts opened within the past 24 months rather than the number of hard inquiries). Barclaycard doesn’t have a hard limit on how many cards/inquiries you can have had in the past 24 months and this denial reason definitely isn’t new.
It’s also important to remember that Barclaycard pulls your TransUnion credit report in most cases and depending on where you live and what cards you apply for this is likely to be the least used credit bureau and therefore a denial due to excessive inquiries is less likely (this is one of the reasons that Chase looks at accounts opened rather than inquiries as new accounts will appear on all three credit bureaus whereas inquiries will only appear on the credit bureaus where a report was pulled).
