CFPB Consumer Complaints Excluding Credit Reporting (Monthly)

## What this measures

The number of complaints the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received each month about every product except credit reports and other consumer reports: debt collection, credit and prepaid cards, checking and savings accounts, mortgages, student, vehicle and personal loans, money transfers and debt management.

## Why it matters

Credit-report complaints dominate the total and are shaped by bulk filing through credit-repair services. Without them, the series is a cleaner read of problems with the money people owe and hold: collections, card and account disputes, loan servicing and payments.

## How to read it

Higher means more complaints. Compare a month with the same month a year earlier; tax season and holiday spending move a few products seasonally.

## 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.