The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s newly published tally of 2025 complaints shows one problem now towers over every other category combined: credit and consumer reporting errors. Consumers filed more grievances about wrong information on their credit files last year than about every bank account, credit card, debt collector, and money-transfer complaint combined. For older Americans, whose credit history quietly underpins a mortgage refinance, a Medigap enrollment, or a landlord’s background check, the scale of the problem is notable less for its size than for how rarely it results in the company actually paying anything back.
5.8 Million Complaints, 88 Percent of Everything
The bureau’s 2025 Consumer Response Annual Report counted approximately 5,806,800 complaints about credit or consumer reporting out of 6,635,408 complaints received across every financial product it tracks in 2025. That works out to 88 percent of the total. Debt collection, credit cards, checking or savings accounts, and money transfers or virtual currencies, combined, accounted for only 11 percent.
Complaint volume has climbed almost every year since 2019, but credit reporting has outpaced nearly everything else the bureau tracks. The report says complaint volume for that category rose 182 percent compared with the monthly average of the two years before it, and the single most common issue named inside those complaints, incorrect information on a credit report, rose 249 percent over the same comparison period.
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Three Companies Draw Most of the Complaints
Of the 5.8 million credit-reporting complaints, roughly 5,102,800 named one of the three nationwide credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion, sometimes alongside a separate complaint about the data furnisher that supplied the disputed information. The bureau’s complaint form lets a consumer name up to four companies in a single submission, which is one reason the count of complaints exceeds any single company’s numbers. The most frequent complaint by far concerned incorrect information: wrong account balances, payments marked late that were not, old public records that should have aged off, and personal details attached to the wrong person’s file. Many of those complaints cited identity theft or fraud directly, with consumers attaching police reports or FTC identity-theft affidavits to back the dispute.
What 'Closed With Relief' Actually Means
The bureau sorts responses into three outcomes: closed with an explanation, closed with non-monetary relief, meaning a company corrects, removes, or updates an entry, or closed with monetary relief, meaning the company reports an actual payment to the consumer. Of the credit-reporting complaints companies responded to in 2025, 51 percent closed with only an explanation, 40 percent closed with non-monetary relief, and 0.02 percent closed with monetary relief. A corrected line on a credit file, in other words, is the realistic outcome of a dispute; a payment almost never is.
Companies did respond quickly in most cases. The bureau reports they answered 99.9 percent of the credit-reporting complaints sent to them, and as of March 2, 2026, less than 0.01 percent of those complaints were still pending with either the company or the bureau itself, according to the report published March 31, 2026.
Older Consumers Are Tracked as Their Own Category
The bureau separately tracks complaints from people who volunteer their age, labeling anyone who reports being 62 or older an older consumer. Roughly 654,200 complaints, about 10 percent of everything submitted in 2025, came from someone in that group. That figure is tallied apart from the industry-wide credit-reporting count above, and the bureau’s report does not break out what share of those 654,200 complaints concerned a credit report specifically. Given how heavily reporting errors dominate the complaint mix overall, it is reasonable to expect the pattern holds inside the older-consumer count as well, though the bureau stops short of publishing that exact split.
A Bureau That Says the System Still Needs Fixing
The bureau points to several forces behind the surge: a growing number of third parties, including credit-repair companies and financial-advice accounts on social media the report calls FinTok, filing complaints on a consumer’s behalf; more consumers returning to the complaint process multiple times in a single year; and, the report adds, new technology such as large language models and autonomous software systems that only further complicate this area and create greater demands on government and companies generally. The bureau says it is exploring changes to align the complaint process with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, though no rule change had been finalized as of the report’s publication. Every complaint the bureau receives is also logged in its public Consumer Complaint Database, searchable by company and product.
The Money Complaints Never Recover
Separately from credit-report disputes, several benefit programs older households qualify for sit unclaimed for a similar reason: nobody is required to send a notice, and the household has to apply. Unclaimed property held by state treasurers, Medicare Savings Programs that cover Part B premiums, and local circuit-breaker property-tax credits all work this way, sitting on record until someone files the paperwork. None of them show up on a credit report, and none of them get flagged the way a billing error does.
It is 69 pages and eleven programs, with the 2026 income limits and a 50-state phone directory, and a printable tracker is included with the download.
Read the 2026 income limits for every program on the list in The Benefits Checklist.
This report was produced with AI assistance and checked against its sources before publishing.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
