Credit Complaints by State: Georgia Files 27x More Than South Dakota

Georgia has under a third of California’s people and nearly as many complaints

You’d assume credit trouble is spread fairly evenly across the country. Some states poorer, some richer, but nothing wild.

It isn’t even close to even.

A Georgian is 27 times more likely to file a credit reporting complaint than a South Dakotan. Georgia filed 33.93 complaints per 1,000 residents in 2025. South Dakota filed 1.26. The national rate is 14.05.

The raw counts land the same point. Georgia filed 383,484 credit reporting complaints in 2025. California has 3.5 times Georgia’s people. It filed 440,292. So Georgia produced 87% of California’s complaint volume with 29% of its population. Against New York it’s starker: Georgia filed 1.44 times New York’s total with a little over half the people.

What we measured

Complaints come from the CFPB’s public file, filtered to credit reporting products, Date received in calendar 2025. Population comes from the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates, the July 1 2025 figure. We divided one by the other. That’s it.

We checked the population file rather than trusting it: the 50 states plus DC sum to the published US total of 341,784,857 exactly, delta zero.

Rank	State	Complaints	Per 1,000
1	Georgia	383,484	33.93
2	Mississippi	95,081	32.19
3	Florida	727,168	30.99
4	Alabama	133,985	25.80
5	Louisiana	117,480	25.44
6	Texas	698,624	22.03
…
48	Montana	1,499	1.31
49	Wyoming	769	1.31
50	Vermont	814	1.26
51	South Dakota	1,174	1.26

Now the honest limit on that denominator. It’s total population, not credit-active adults. States differ in age structure and in the share of adults who even have a credit file. A per-credit-file rate would be better. But no authoritative state-level count of credit files exists, so we used the reproducible second-best and labeled it rather than implying precision we don’t have.

Puerto Rico is excluded from the map. It’s in the Census file, it isn’t a state, and it would distort the ramp.

Credit scores explain 46% of it. We can’t explain the rest.

The obvious answer is that people with worse credit complain more. We tested it. It’s half right, and the half that’s wrong is the interesting half.

Correlate each state’s 2025 complaint rate against its average FICO score across all 50 states and you get r = -0.675, so r² = 0.456. Lower average score, more complaints. Real, and in the direction you’d expect. Average credit score explains about 46% of the variance between states.

But it cannot explain the size:

• Average FICO across states runs 680 to 742. That’s a 1.09x spread.
• Complaint rates run 1.26 to 33.93. That’s a 27x spread.

A 9% spread in credit quality sits next to a 2,600% spread in complaint rates. Credit quality is clearly involved. It’s just as clearly not doing most of the work.

We don’t know what is. That’s the finding, and we’d rather publish it than invent a story that sounds better. Correlation isn’t causation and this page makes no causal claim at all.

So here’s what we can offer instead, sourced rather than speculated. The CFPB itself attributes complaint growth partly to “third parties using the complaint process, including credit repair organizations and those who offer credit advice online and on social media platforms” (CFPB, FCRA 611(e) report, December 2025). That’s the regulator’s assessment, reported as theirs. Not ours. We have no state-level data on third-party filing, so we make no state-level claim about it.

What this means for your file

Nothing, and that’s not a dodge. It’s the actual answer.

Your zip code doesn’t set your score. Not at all. Georgia’s complaint rate is a fact about Georgia’s filing behavior, not about any Georgian’s credit report. A high-complaint state doesn’t mean your report is more likely to be wrong. A low-complaint state doesn’t mean it’s clean. South Dakota’s 1.26 could just as easily mean nobody there is checking.

That’s worth sitting with. A low complaint rate is not evidence of a low error rate. It’s evidence of a low complaint rate.

The only thing that tells you about your report is your report. Read it. Credit Booster AI pulls all three and tracks what changes, on a 7-day free trial. Where you live isn’t a factor in what it finds.

Method

Complaints. CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, bulk CSV, https://files.consumerfinance.gov/ccdb/complaints.csv.zip. Pulled 2026-07-16. SHA256 9746821f7bfffb09947cab3e1d9acb3400edabb78388c8fbe70ff71f35aaaf48. Filtered to credit reporting products (both product labels the CFPB has used), Date received in calendar 2025.

Population. US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 State Population Estimates (NST-EST2025), POPESTIMATE2025, the July 1 2025 estimate. Pulled 2026-07-16. SHA256 92188e29cb0a67dcf95afa7d6c47359409782f086478b70ea4128eb70e223ca9. Validated: 50 states plus DC sum to the published US total exactly.

Credit scores. Used only for the correlation. Average FICO by state, the dataset already published on this site, originally sourced from Experian.

US totals. 4,802,387 complaints attributed to the 50 states plus DC, over those same jurisdictions’ 341,784,857 residents, = 14.05 per 1,000. Numerator and denominator cover the identical 51 jurisdictions. Puerto Rico, the territories and the military ZIPs (AA, AE, AP) are excluded from both sides. Complaints with a blank state are excluded from the map.

Why 2025. The file ends 2026-07-16, so 2026 is a partial year. Dividing half a year of complaints by a full year of population would understate every state by roughly half.