CFPB Consumer Complaint Volume

Each month on this page counts complaints by the date the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received them, and only those it sent to a company and has published in its public Consumer Complaint Database. The bureau publishes no seasonally adjusted count, so each month is set against the same month a year earlier. The latest month was up 167,523 from 510,376 in August 2025.

The count has been higher than in the same month a year earlier for 56 months in a row.

A complaint appears in the database only after the company responds or after 15 days, whichever comes first, so the newest weeks fill in later. Counts for earlier months can also move up or down weeks afterward, and the CFPB publishes no revision policy.

The count is complaints, not people. The CFPB says the number of complaints does not equal the number of consumers who sent them, and since April 2017 one submission can name up to four companies, each of which gets its own complaint. The bureau also says the database is not a statistical sample. Complaints about smaller banks and credit unions, those under about $10 billion in assets, go to their own regulators and are not published here.

Most of the volume is credit reporting. In August 2026, 92.6% of published complaints were about credit reporting or other personal consumer reports, and 2,959 were about mortgages. In its 2025 annual report the CFPB listed possible reasons for the growth: third parties such as credit repair companies using the process, more consumers coming to it, more complaints sent in one session, and more consumers returning. It says that, without addressing these issues, it cannot rely on portal data as a reliable picture of market conditions. Two 2026 process changes can also move the count: consumers are now told to dispute a credit report error with the credit bureau first, and two-factor sign-in was announced on June 24, 2026.

Complaints are a separate record from missed payments. For those, see Credit Card Delinquency and Foreclosure Starts.