State of Credit Complaints 2026: The Annual Data Report

Executive summary

This is our annual report on the state of credit reporting complaints in America, built from the CFPB’s full public complaint file: 16,934,825 complaints, every row read. Three findings define 2025.

1. Complaint volume grew 17-fold in five years. Credit reporting complaints to the CFPB went from 283,716 in 2020 to 4,810,498 in 2025. The CFPB’s own December 2025 report describes “an almost 3,000% increase” in complaints about the three big bureaus since January 1, 2020. Our full analysis of the surge is in the complaint surge study.

2. The number one complaint is “this isn’t mine.” In 2025, 1,923,820 complaints, 39.99% of the year’s total, said information on a credit report belongs to someone else. That is roughly twice the next category. The top complaint in America is not about a late payment or a balance. It is about whose data it is.

3. The entire surge arrived through a web form. 99.77% of 2025 credit complaints were filed online. Web filings rose 17.7x since 2020, from 271,010 to 4,799,271. Telephone filings rose 1.06x, from 5,232 to 5,554. The hardest channel to automate barely moved.

Each finding gets its own section below, followed by the state rankings, what happens after a complaint is filed, and the full methodology.

The national trend

Year	Credit reporting complaints
2019	138,556
2020	283,716
2021	307,539
2022	604,187
2023	1,046,876
2024	2,365,595
2025	4,810,498

From 2021 onward the series roughly doubles every year. 2026 is on the same track: the file ends 2026-07-16 and web filings alone already stood at 3,832,014 through mid-July, which is 14.1x the 2020 full year. We exclude partial 2026 from every chart and every share-of-total claim, because plotting half a year against full years misstates the trend.

How the surge arrived

The CFPB records how each complaint reached it. Splitting the surge by that field is the single most informative cut in this dataset.

Year	Web	Phone	Postal	Web index	Phone index
2019	128,258	4,380	2,774	47	84
2020	271,010	5,232	2,819	100	100
2021	299,608	4,818	889	111	92
2022	589,773	9,421	2,679	218	180
2023	1,033,654	8,891	3,788	381	170
2024	2,352,770	6,354	5,724	868	121
2025	4,799,271	5,554	3,820	1,771	106

Filing by phone means a human calls the CFPB and talks to a person. It cannot be scripted or bulk-submitted, which makes it an accidental control group. It went up 322 calls in five years. Postal mail is flat too. If a wave of genuine new credit trouble had hit American files after 2020, it should show up in every channel. It shows up in one.

What this rules in: the surge is, at minimum, largely a change in how complaints get submitted. What it does not prove: that no real increase in credit problems happened, or who caused the growth. The CFPB’s own read, from its December 2025 FCRA 611(e) report, 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” and to “an increase in the number of complaints submitted in a single session.” That is the regulator’s assessment. Our channel data is consistent with it. It is not proof of it.

What Americans complain about

Every complaint carries a consumer-selected sub-issue. We counted the CFPB’s own labels, unmodified, for calendar 2025.

Sub-issue	Complaints	Share
Information belongs to someone else	1,923,820	39.99%
Reporting company used your report improperly	847,184	17.61%
Their investigation did not fix an error on your report	502,506	10.45%
Account information incorrect	475,483	9.88%
Investigation took more than 30 days	289,490	6.02%
Account status incorrect	251,603	5.23%
Credit inquiries on your report that you don’t recognize	246,463	5.12%
Personal information incorrect	103,567	2.15%

Two in five complaints are not an argument about a number attached to something the consumer did. They are a file integrity problem: the wrong person’s data attached to a name, through mixed files, identity confusion, or misattributed accounts. The full breakdown, including why this category is structurally different from the rest, is in our “that isn’t mine” study.

The second story in that table: two categories describe the fix mechanism failing after the consumer already complained. The investigation did not fix the error (502,506) and the investigation took more than 30 days (289,490). Together that is 791,996 complaints, 16.5% of the year. The process that exists to correct errors is itself a top-three complaint.

Where the complaints come from

Complaint filing is wildly uneven across the country. We divided each state’s calendar 2025 credit reporting complaints by its July 2025 Census population estimate, identically for all 51 jurisdictions. The full ranking and map are in the complaints by state study.

Top of the table, complaints per 1,000 residents, 2025:

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

Bottom of the table:

Rank	State	Complaints	Per 1,000
48	Montana	1,499	1.31
49	Wyoming	769	1.31
50	Vermont	814	1.26
51	South Dakota	1,174	1.26

The national rate is 14.05 per 1,000. A Georgian is about 27 times more likely to file than a South Dakotan.

The Georgia versus California comparison makes the point without per-capita math. California has 3.5 times Georgia’s people and filed 440,292 complaints, third most in the country, at 11.19 per 1,000, ranking 17th of 51. Georgia filed 383,484. So Georgia produced 87% of California’s complaint volume with 29% of its population.

Can credit quality explain the spread? Only partly, and we tested it. Each state’s complaint rate correlates with its average FICO Score at r = -0.675, so r squared = 0.456: average score explains about 46% of the state-to-state variance. But average FICO across states runs 680 to 742, a 1.09x spread, while complaint rates run 1.26 to 33.93, a 27x spread. Credit quality is involved. It is clearly not doing most of the work, and we do not know what is. We would rather publish that than invent a story.

A low complaint rate is not evidence of a low error rate. It is evidence of a low complaint rate. For what the numbers pair with in each state’s law, see the state guides for Georgia, California, Florida, and Texas.

What happens after a complaint is filed

The CFPB publishes how each company said a complaint closed. In 2025, among closed complaints, TransUnion reported resolving 64.45% with relief (1,032,428 of 1,601,849), Equifax 63.44% (1,066,135 of 1,680,536), and Experian 0.44% (6,130 of 1,388,821). That is 1 in 227 at Experian, and a 144x gap between Equifax and Experian in the same year, under the same process.

The caveat has to travel with the number: the closure label is chosen by the company being complained about. The CFPB says it “uses the term ‘relief’ for actions the NCRAs report they have taken in response to CFPB complaints.” A collapsing reported relief rate can mean less relief was granted, or the same actions filed under a different label, or both. The public file cannot separate those, so we report what was reported. The quarter-by-quarter series, the bounds checks, and ProPublica’s prior reporting are in our relief rate study.

How to read these numbers

Every figure in this report is a count of complaints filed, not of people harmed or errors confirmed. One person filing about the same account against all three bureaus lands as three complaints. A complaint is an allegation; nobody adjudicates whether the consumer was right. And the channel data above is the clearest possible evidence that, after 2020, complaint volume measures submission behavior at least as much as it measures credit problems.

So if you quote a number from this report, quote that paragraph next to it. That request applies to our own pages too.

What this means for your file

Nothing in this report changes your credit, and a complaint form is not a fix. The one action the data does support is boring: read all three of your reports, line by line, and look for information that is not yours, because that is the single biggest complaint category in America. Your reports are free at AnnualCreditReport.com. If you want the reading and the change-tracking done for you across all three bureaus, Credit Booster AI does that on a 7-day free trial.

Methodology

Complaint data. CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, bulk CSV, https://files.consumerfinance.gov/ccdb/complaints.csv.zip. Pulled 2026-07-16, upstream Last-Modified: Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:33:37 GMT. SHA256 9746821f7bfffb09947cab3e1d9acb3400edabb78388c8fbe70ff71f35aaaf48. N = 16,934,825 complaints, 2011-12-01 to 2026-07-16. Every row read, nothing sampled.

Product filter. Credit reporting products only, counting both product labels the CFPB has used across the series. The CFPB renamed the product mid-series, and filtering on a single label silently drops years of data.

Reporting year. 2025, the most recent complete calendar year. Partial 2026 is excluded from every chart and every share-of-total claim.

Channel. The CFPB’s Submitted via field, unmodified, indexed to 2020, the CFPB’s own baseline in its December 2025 report. Fax and email are omitted from the chart: fax reached 0 by 2023 and email is approximately 0 throughout.

Sub-issues. The CFPB’s own Sub-issue field, unmodified. It is a consumer-selected menu item, so it inherits whatever the CFPB’s form nudges people toward. That is a real limitation and we cannot correct for it.

Population. US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 State Population Estimates (NST-EST2025), POPESTIMATE2025, the July 1 2025 estimate. Pulled 2026-07-16. SHA256 92188e29cb0a67dcf95afa7d6c47359409782f086478b70ea4128eb70e223ca9. Validated: the 50 states plus DC sum to the published US total of 341,784,857 exactly. US rate: 4,802,387 complaints attributed to the 51 jurisdictions over 341,784,857 residents = 14.05 per 1,000. Puerto Rico, the territories, and military ZIPs are excluded from both sides.

Relief rates. Within-company rates: (monetary plus non-monetary relief) divided by all of that company’s closed complaints. Bureau matching uses the CFPB’s normalized company strings. In-progress complaints are excluded from denominators. Every 2025 quarter cited was 0.0% open at pull time.

Scores. Average FICO Score by state, used only for the correlation, from the dataset already published on this site, originally sourced from Experian.

Our own record. Credit Booster AI appears 0 times in the company field across all 16,934,825 rows. We checked ourselves before writing about anyone else.

Sources

Every figure in this report traces to one of these.

• CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, bulk file pulled 2026-07-16, per the methodology above
• CFPB, Fair Credit Reporting Act Section 611(e) annual report, December 2025, for the quoted passages on complaint growth and relief terminology
• US Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 State Population Estimates (NST-EST2025), July 1 2025 estimates
• Experian, average FICO Score by state, used for the score correlation
• Joel Jacobs, “Experian and TransUnion Are Leaving More Mistakes on Credit Reports”, ProPublica, March 10, 2026, prior reporting on bureau relief rates