2025 Credit Reporting Complaints: Issues and Investigation Problems

Key findings

501,566 published 2025 credit-reporting complaint records said an investigation did not fix a report error. That is the sub-issue those consumers selected on the complaint form. It is a description of what people said happened to them, not a finding that a company broke the law, not a count of unique people, and not a dispute failure rate.

These numbers describe a public complaint database. They are not evidence about CreditHound's own results, and they say nothing about whether any individual complaint was justified.

2024 to 2025 comparison

Published complaint records selecting "Their investigation did not fix an error on your report" rose +96.04%, from 255,848 in 2024 to 501,566 in 2025. That growth needs context: all selected records roughly doubled. The not-fixed share of investigation-related records rose +2.52 percentage points, while its share of all selected records fell 0.40 percentage points.

Both years use the exact same product, sub-product, issue and sub-issue labels, counted by date received (January 1 inclusive to January 1 of the next year, exclusive). 2024 to 2025 is the earliest adjacent full-year pair available under this exact current taxonomy; older categories are not mapped or mixed, and two years are not a longer trend. Counts were retrieved September 28, 2026 (UTC) and may change, because the CFPB generally updates the database daily. The CFPB says the database is not representative of all consumers' experiences.

Units are published complaint records, which are consumer allegations - not unique consumers, verified errors, violations, failure rates, a population sample, CreditHound leads or qualified cases. Exact six-decimal values are in the comparison downloads below.

Issues consumers selected

Every label below is preserved exactly as it appears in the public database. Shares use the 4,800,102 selected records as the denominator. Labels with a positive but very small share are shown as "<0.1%" rather than rounded down to zero.

Inside the investigation complaints

The parent denominator for this table is the 856,417 records filed under "Problem with a company's investigation into an existing problem".

The "Investigation took more than 30 days" label records what the complainant selected. It does not establish that any investigation was legally overdue: the timing rules have exceptions, and the database does not report how a given investigation was handled.

Chart

How to read these numbers

Issue and sub-issue labels describe what the person filing chose from a fixed list on the CFPB complaint form. They are the consumer's description of the problem. Publication of a complaint, or a company's response to it, is not proof that anything was resolved or that anything was wrong.

Aggregates like these cannot tell you how common credit-report errors are across the population, whether any particular claim would succeed in court, or whether a given situation would qualify for attorney review. The database is not a representative sample, records are not deduplicated to unique people, and one person can file more than once. We publish no company rankings, no year-over-year comparison and no causal claim here.

• The CFPB database is not a representative sample of all consumers.
• A complaint is an allegation, not a verified error, legal violation, qualified case or successful claim.
• Complaint records are not deduplicated to unique consumers or underlying disputes.
• Issue and sub-issue labels are preserved from the public database; this analysis does not recode them.
• The denominator is the selected published credit-reporting complaint records; it excludes the other-personal-consumer-report sub-product.
• The database can change after retrieval, so this is a dated snapshot rather than a live total.
• No narratives, names, contact details, complaint IDs, states, ZIP codes or company-level rankings are included.
• A company response or timely response is not proof that the underlying report was corrected.

Methodology

The figures come from a single query against the public CFPB complaint search API, plus two independent verification queries. Only aggregate counts were used in this analysis; no narratives or consumer-level records are included in the downloads.

• Source query: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints/search/api/v1/?date_received_min=2025-01-01&date_received_max=2026-01-01&product=Credit+reporting+or+other+personal+consumer+reports%E2%80%A2Credit+reporting&size=1&no_aggs=false
• Date received from 2025-01-01 (inclusive) to 2026-01-01 (exclusive).
• Filter: product and sub-product supplied together as the bullet-separated value "Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports•Credit reporting". The other-personal-consumer-report sub-product is excluded.
• Unit of analysis: published complaint records. No deduplication to people or to underlying disputes.
• Tables use the facet counts for issue and sub-issue. The query's product facet can ignore the product filter (it reports 5,452,105), so it is not used as a denominator anywhere. The denominator is the query's hits total, 4,800,102.
• Verification: total relation "eq", timed_out false, failed shards 0, issue counts sum to the total, the five investigation sub-issue counts sum to 856,417, and two independently filtered queries returned 856,417 and 501,566.
• Counts are exact. Shares are rounded to one decimal for display, and percentages in the downloads are rounded to six decimal places; the downloads also carry the record unit. Positive shares under 0.1% are displayed as "<0.1%".
• Retrieval timestamp: 2026-09-18T16:46:35.133540+00:00.
• The public database changes as complaints are published, so these totals are a snapshot.

Reference material: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, API documentation, field reference, CFPB notes on using complaint data, and the complaint form product and issue options.

Cite and download

You are welcome to quote or reuse these aggregates with attribution. The citation text below is always visible, so it works without JavaScript.

CreditHound, "2025 Credit Reporting Complaints: Issues and Investigation Problems" (https://credithound.io/resources/credit-reporting-complaints-2025). CreditHound analysis of the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, complaints received 2025-01-01 through 2026-01-01 (exclusive); snapshot retrieved September 18, 2026, 16:46 UTC. Counts are published complaint records, which are consumer allegations, not verified errors or proven violations.

Both files are free, need no sign-in, and contain the same aggregate counts shown above: totals, every issue label, and every investigation sub-issue label. They contain no complaint narratives, no complaint IDs and no consumer records.

The comparison files hold only the three 2024 and 2025 aggregate counts, their changes, the three shares with percentage-point changes, the exact filter labels and date boundaries, the retrieval date, documentation links, formulas and caveats.

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Data dictionary

Column names below are exactly the headers in the CSV download.

All rows are as of the September 18, 2026, 16:46 UTC snapshot of complaints received in 2025. The JSON download carries the same values with the same two denominators.

Your next step

Does this sound like your situation? Your own records matter more than the totals.

• Printable dispute evidence checklist lists what to keep and gives you a worksheet.
• Dispute came back verified but is still wrong covers an unchanged result.
• The CFPB explains options when you disagree with dispute results.

CreditHound is not a law firm and does not write, send, or file disputes for you. We help you gather the details about what looks wrong, and with your consent your situation can go to an independent partner law firm for review. This page is general consumer information, not legal advice.