The mere fact of having multiple credit cards does not affect your credit score either way. It’s how you use and manage your cards that will affect your credit.
Don’t overuse a card
For starters, when swiping any credit card, it’s important to make sure the credit utilization on the card stays low. So if the credit limit on a card is $1,000, don’t rack up a balance of $950. It’s best to keep credit utilization down at 6%, which for a $1k credit limit would equal a balance lower than $90.
If credit utilization is high on many of your cards, it can really knock your credit score down.
Manage your payments well
Having multiple credit cards will put a bigger strain on you to keep track of timely payments on each one. It’s super important to try not to miss a single payment on any card. Once a payment is 30 days late and goes untended to, it can quickly become 90 days late, and more, and wreck your credit.
On the other side of it, if you do manage to keep your payments timely over all your cards, then it can greatly enhance your credit.
Conclusion
As proved with both of the examples in this post, having many credit cards will impact your credit score depending on how well you manage and use your cards.