CFPB Complaints: Checking and Savings Accounts (Monthly)

## What this measures

The number of complaints the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received each month about checking and savings accounts (called "bank account or service" before April 2017).

## Why it matters

Account complaints surface frozen accounts, fraud and scam losses, overdraft and fee disputes, and problems when banks change systems.

## How to read it

Higher means more complaints about this product. Compare with the same month a year earlier, and with the total (cfpb.complaints.total) for its share.

## What it does not say

The database is not a statistical sample: CFPB says it "is not a statistical sample of consumers’ experiences in the marketplace", so counts reflect who chooses to complain, campaigns by credit-repair firms and changes in how complaints are submitted, as well as how firms treat customers. CFPB publishes a complaint after the company responds or after 15 days, so the latest month or two keep rising for a few weeks. Product categories were renamed in April 2017 and again in 2022; Palanor groups them so the series stays comparable.

## How it's built

Counted by month the CFPB received the complaint, from the database's own aggregations (one query per month, inclusive of the first and last day). History from December 2011, the database's first month.

## Source

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Complaint Database (consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints), read through its public search API. CFPB: "All complaint data we publish is freely available for anyone to use, analyze, and build on"; the API metadata states the licence as CC0. Refreshed daily by /api/cron/risk-events-sync?source=cfpb, which rewrites the latest six months.