What a CFPB complaint is, and is not

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau takes complaints about financial products and services, sends each one to the company named, and publishes a record of it. That record is the raw material for every page on this site. It is worth being exact about what it is.

What it is

• A consumer's submission. Someone filled in the CFPB form, chose a product and an issue from the Bureau's lists, and named a company.
• Routed to the company. The Bureau forwards the complaint and the company is expected to respond, generally within 15 days, with a final response within 60.
• Published after a response or 15 days. In the Bureau's words, complaints are published “after the company responds, confirming a commercial relationship with the consumer, or after 15 days, whichever comes first.”
• Closed with a category. The company records how it closed the complaint: with an explanation, with monetary relief, or with non-monetary relief.

What it is not

• Not verified. The CFPB does not verify every allegation in a complaint before publishing it; publication follows the company's response or the 15-day mark, whichever comes first.
• Not a finding. A complaint on file does not mean a regulator found the company broke a rule. Most are closed with an explanation.
• Not a sample. The Bureau says the database “is not a statistical sample of consumers' experiences in the marketplace and these complaints are not necessarily representative of all consumers' experiences with a financial product or company.” People who complain to a federal agency are not typical of all customers, and awareness of the CFPB varies by place and product.
• Not a measure of company quality on its own. The Bureau's caution, which this site prints on every page (source):

When looking at complaint volume about a company or product, consider company size and/or market share. For example, companies with more customers may have more complaints than companies with fewer customers.

Why credit bureaus dominate the counts

Roughly three of every four complaints in recent years name one of the three nationwide credit reporting companies. Each holds a file on nearly every adult who has used credit, consumers are encouraged to dispute report errors, and a single consumer often files against all three at once. The totals say more about the reach of credit reporting than about any comparison between those companies and a bank or a lender.

Which companies are in the database

The Bureau also notes that it does not publish complaints it refers to other regulators, such as complaints about depository institutions with less than $10 billion in assets. Smaller banks and credit unions are therefore largely absent, and a company's count on this site is not comparable with a smaller institution's.

What this site adds, and leaves out

The site counts the coded fields and sets each company's count beside a public measure of its size where one exists. It leaves out the narrative text entirely. To read the records themselves, or to submit a complaint, go to the CFPB's database.