Original Research

The Credit Reporting Complaint Explosion

Name: U.S. CFPB Aggregated Consumer Complaint Dataset (2011–2026)
Creator: Settlement Insight
Published: 2026-06-06
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

We analyzed all 17,159,104 complaints in the U.S. CFPB Consumer Complaint Database. Three credit bureaus account for 77.8% of every complaint filed — and annual volume has exploded 32.3× since 2015.

Reviewed by Leonard Goldberg, Editor · Last updated August 20, 2026

17.2M

Consumer complaints

Filed 2011-12 – 2026-08

32.3×

Growth, 2015 → 2025

168K → 5.4M per year

77.8%

From the Big Three bureaus

Equifax, Experian, TransUnion combined

81.3%

Are credit-reporting complaints

vs. all other financial products

Key Findings

The CFPB’s public complaint database is one of the largest records of consumer financial grievance in the United States. Our aggregation of all 17,159,104 complaints filed since December 2011 surfaces a striking concentration — and an extraordinary growth curve.

Three companies dominate. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion together account for 13,342,159 complaints — 77.8% of the entire database — out of 8,062 distinct companies.
Volume grew 32.3× in a decade. Annual complaints rose from 168,273 in 2015 to 5,442,974 in 2025.
Credit reporting swamps everything else. 81.3% of all complaints concern credit reports — debt collection, mortgages, and credit cards make up most of the rest.
The surge is recent and accelerating. More than half of all complaints in the database were filed in 2024–2025 alone.

Complaints filed per year

Full calendar years, 2012–2025. The 2026 figure (4,476,707 through June) is partial and excluded from the chart.

Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, aggregated by Settlement Insight.

The Big Three credit bureaus

Of 8,062 companies named in the database, just three — the national credit-reporting agencies — draw 77.8% of all complaints:

4.7M

TransUnion

27.4% of all complaints

4.5M

Equifax

26.4% of all complaints

4.1M

Experian

23.9% of all complaints

What people complain about

Complaint volume by financial product. Credit-reporting categories dwarf every other product.

Where complaints come from

Top 10 states by complaint volume.

State	Complaints	Share
Texas	2,349,347	13.7%
Florida	2,346,802	13.7%
California	1,706,775	9.9%
Georgia	1,265,283	7.4%
New York	997,902	5.8%
Illinois	733,974	4.3%
Pennsylvania	673,323	3.9%
North Carolina	588,587	3.4%
New Jersey	547,898	3.2%
MD	421,853	2.5%

Cite this research

This analysis is released as an open, citable dataset. Researchers and journalists are welcome to use it with attribution.

DOI

Permanent identifier

10.5281/zenodo.20575559

APA

Goldberg, L. (2026). U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Aggregated Consumer Complaint Dataset (2011–2026) [Data set]. Settlement Insight. https://settlementinsight.com/research/credit-report-complaints

BibTeX

@dataset{goldberg_2026_cfpb,
  author    = {Goldberg, Leonard},
  title     = {{U.S. CFPB -- Aggregated Consumer Complaint Dataset (2011--2026)}},
  year      = 2026,
  publisher = {Settlement Insight},
  url       = {https://settlementinsight.com/research/credit-report-complaints}
}

Download the data

Aggregated CSV files — CC BY 4.0. Free to use with attribution.

Methodology

We aggregated the complete public CFPB Consumer Complaint Database (17,159,104 records received between 2011-12-01 and 2026-08-18). Counts are grouped by company, product, year, and state exactly as reported by the CFPB. No records were dropped or weighted.

The CFPB database grows every day, so this page is regenerated from the live copy. The archived dataset behind the DOI is a fixed snapshot taken on 6 June 2026, when it held 15,694,521 complaints — a citation points at that frozen version, which is why its totals sit below the ones shown here.

Important caveats

A complaint is a consumer submission, not a proven violation. The CFPB does not verify the factual claims in each complaint.
The recent surge is concentrated in credit-reporting disputes, many submitted in bulk through third-party credit-repair services — so growth reflects both rising consumer use and changing submission patterns, not solely an increase in underlying problems.
Company names are reported as-filed and not consolidated across corporate subsidiaries beyond the CFPB’s own normalization.
The 2026 figure is a partial year and is excluded from year-over-year comparisons.

The full aggregated dataset is available above as CSV downloads under a CC BY 4.0 license. Source data is published by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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