diff --git a/lib/strcase.c b/lib/strcase.c
index 9f70f41bd6..6c3597cc37 100644
--- a/lib/strcase.c
+++ b/lib/strcase.c
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
 #include "strcase.h"
 
 /* Mapping table to go from lowercase to uppercase for plain ASCII.*/
-static const unsigned char touppermap[256] = {
+const unsigned char Curl_touppermap[256] = {
   0,   1,   2,   3,   4,   5,   6,   7,   8,   9,   10,  11,  12,  13,  14,
   15,  16,  17,  18,  19,  20,  21,  22,  23,  24,  25,  26,  27,  28,  29,
   30,  31,  32,  33,  34,  35,  36,  37,  38,  39,  40,  41,  42,  43,  44,
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ static const unsigned char touppermap[256] = {
 };
 
 /* Mapping table to go from uppercase to lowercase for plain ASCII.*/
-static const unsigned char tolowermap[256] = {
+const unsigned char Curl_tolowermap[256] = {
   0,   1,   2,   3,   4,   5,   6,   7,   8,   9,   10,  11,  12,  13,  14,
   15,  16,  17,  18,  19,  20,  21,  22,  23,  24,  25,  26,  27,  28,  29,
   30,  31,  32,  33,  34,  35,  36,  37,  38,  39,  40,  41,  42,  43,  44,
@@ -69,20 +69,6 @@ static const unsigned char tolowermap[256] = {
   255
 };
 
-/* Portable, consistent toupper. Do not use toupper() because its behavior is
-   altered by the current locale. */
-char Curl_raw_toupper(char in)
-{
-  return (char)touppermap[(unsigned char)in];
-}
-
-/* Portable, consistent tolower. Do not use tolower() because its behavior is
-   altered by the current locale. */
-char Curl_raw_tolower(char in)
-{
-  return (char)tolowermap[(unsigned char)in];
-}
-
 /* Copy an upper case version of the string from src to dest. The
  * strings may overlap. No more than n characters of the string are copied
  * (including any NUL) and the destination string will NOT be
diff --git a/lib/strcase.h b/lib/strcase.h
index 54299812be..559db875bd 100644
--- a/lib/strcase.h
+++ b/lib/strcase.h
@@ -25,8 +25,24 @@
  ***************************************************************************/
 #include "curl_setup.h"
 
-char Curl_raw_toupper(char in);
-char Curl_raw_tolower(char in);
+/* Mapping tables for plain ASCII case conversion, defined in strcase.c.
+   Declared here so the conversions below inline at every call site without
+   relying on LTO or a unity build: casecompare() invokes one of them twice
+   per byte compared, where the call costs more than the lookup itself. */
+extern const unsigned char Curl_touppermap[256];
+extern const unsigned char Curl_tolowermap[256];
+
+/* Portable, consistent toupper/tolower. Do not use toupper()/tolower() from
+   <ctype.h>, whose behavior is altered by the current locale. */
+static CURL_INLINE char Curl_raw_toupper(char in)
+{
+  return (char)Curl_touppermap[(unsigned char)in];
+}
+
+static CURL_INLINE char Curl_raw_tolower(char in)
+{
+  return (char)Curl_tolowermap[(unsigned char)in];
+}
 
 /* checkprefix() is a shorter version of the above, used when the first
    argument is the string literal */