- Key insight: Industry groups have long argued that consumer complaint narratives paint a one-sided picture, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made the same argument Friday when it said it will stop publishing them.
- What's at stake: The complaint database has been a source of controversy ever since the bureau was established more than a decade ago. Consumer advocates argue that the public complaints are a key tool for holding financial institutions accountable.
- Supporting data: Complaints have doubled in each of the last three years. The bureau received 6.6 million complaints in 2025, up from 3.2 million in 2024 and 1.6 million in 2023.
With consumer complaints skyrocketing, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Friday that it will no longer publish complaint narratives, which have long been a sore spot for industry groups.
The change comes just two months after the CFPB, under former acting Director Russell Vought,
Complaints have doubled every year since 2023. The bureau received 6.6 million complaints in 2025, up from 3.2 million in 2024 and 1.6 million in 2023. While full-year 2026 data is not yet available, historical trends show that the number of consumer complaints received by the CFPB escalated dramatically in the past few years.
The CFPB argued Friday that the complaint narratives paint a misleading picture.
"By their very nature, complaint narratives reflect negative consumer experiences and present only one side of an issue," the bureau said in a
The CFPB does not verify any complaints, and it called the complaint narratives that it plans to eliminate "unverified allegations [that] do not always describe violations of the law."
"Publishing such narratives in the database provides a less-than-representative sample of one-sided experiences that cannot provide consumers with a balanced and accurate view of companies' compliance with their legal obligations," the bureau said.
Trade groups representing banks, credit bureaus and other firms that are the subject of complaints have long complained about the database on similar grounds. But consumer advocates see them as a crucial way to hold financial institutions accountable.
During Democratic administrations, the CFPB has viewed the complaint database as an early-warning system to investigate abuses and understand concerns that consumers have about financial products.
The CFPB typically confirms that a complaint has been filed by a real person, but it does not verify the allegations or contact individuals. The complaints are sent to companies, which get two weeks to respond on the record.
Often consumers complain that their complaint is sent and closed with no action or outcome. But in other cases, the CFPB's process does spur companies to respond and, in some instances, provide redress.
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Complaints about the three major credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — have reached historic levels. In 2025 alone, the bureau received approximately 5.1 million complaints, out of a total of 6.6 million, about the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies. The Consumer Data Industry Association, a trade group for the credit bureaus, has lobbied the CFPB to cut complaints because the industry has been inundated with so many of them that the credit bureaus cannot respond quickly enough within the legal timeframe.
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, credit bureaus have 30 days to investigate and resolve a consumer's dispute, plus another 15 days if the consumer submits new evidence after an initial dispute has been filed. If a credit bureau does not respond to a complaint, then a negative item can get dropped from a consumer's credit report. That timeline has led to a surge in complaints from individuals and credit-repair firms trying to get negative information off a consumer's credit report in an effort to boost credit scores.
The recent surge in complaints is almost entirely centered on credit and consumer-reporting issues.
Consumer advocates warned Friday that eliminating complaint narratives from the CFPB's public portal will shield firms from public scrutiny, break with a decade of precedence and hurt consumers' ability to get redress.
Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the CFPB, where she was an architect of the consumer-complaint database, said she thinks the Trump Administration is trying to hide corporate malfeasance from the public.
"Taking down this data doesn't protect consumers from confusion, but it does protect companies from public transparency and scrutiny,"said Meyer, a senior fellow at the Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia Law School. "Burying this information is an intentional decision to make corporate misconduct harder to see."
Mike Pierce, executive director of the nonprofit Protect Borrowers and a former senior advisor to the CFPB's student loan ombudsman, said the CFPB during the second Trump administration has "done favors for financial firms and kicked families in the teeth."
"As costs keep climbing and more Americans turn to debt to stay afloat, this is the worst possible moment to deny the public and policymakers access to basic information about the problems people experience when buying a home, taking out a car loan, paying for college, or putting groceries on a credit card," Pierce said in a press release. "This is just the latest and most extreme example of Trump's consumer watchdog fighting for corporations instead of standing up for the rest of us."
