Canceling a credit card you rarely or never use generally won’t help your credit score and could hurt it slightly. One of the many factors that go into your credit score is credit utilization, which is your balance on a credit card divided by your credit limit on that card. The lower your credit utilization, the better your score. If you close an account with no balance, you are reducing your credit limit. Depending on what else is in your account, this could reduce your score slightly.

On the other hand, opening a lot of cards you don’t need probably won’t raise your score.

Paying off and then closing a card on which you tend to have high utilization could improve your score. Moving the balance to a new card and closing out the old one won’t help.

If having a lot of cards is causing you to go farther into debt, then by all means close the card.