What does the CFPB consumer complaint database count?

Information as of 16 October 2026. Everything below comes from the CFPB's Consumer Complaint Database page and its field reference, linked below. If anything here is wrong, tell us at contact@oqro.io and we will correct it.

What is a complaint?

The CFPB's Consumer Complaint Database describes itself as a collection of complaints about consumer financial products and services that the Bureau sent to companies for response. A consumer submits a complaint about a product such as a mortgage, a credit card, a checking account, a student loan, debt collection or a credit report, names the company, and describes the issue. The Bureau forwards it to the company, which is expected to respond within 15 days and to resolve most complaints within 60 days. The consumer can then dispute the response, and the Bureau uses the complaints to inform its supervision and rulemaking as well as to publish them.

What is published, and when?

The database page explains the publication rule: a complaint is published when the company responds, confirming a commercial relationship with the consumer, or after 15 days, whichever comes first. The field reference lists what each published record contains: the date received, the product and sub-product, the issue and sub-issue, the company, the state and zip code, the channel the complaint came through, the date it was sent to the company, the company's response category (for example closed with explanation, closed with monetary relief, closed with non-monetary relief), whether the response was timely, and whether the consumer disputed it. The consumer's narrative is published only when the consumer consented to it and after personal information has been removed, and the company can add a public response of its own.

The Bureau notes that it does not verify all the facts alleged in a complaint, but takes steps to confirm a commercial relationship between the consumer and the company. The page also says that the database is not a statistical sample of consumers' experiences in the marketplace, and that complaint volume should be considered in the context of company size and market share. A company with tens of millions of accounts will receive more complaints than a small one, so a raw count compares sizes as much as conduct.

How does OQRO count complaints?

The CFPB complaints page shows, for the latest month on file, the number of complaints the Bureau published against each listed financial company OQRO matches, largest first, with a link to the official search for exactly that company and month. The chart on the page sums the complaints per month across the listed companies over two years, and a company page shows its own recent months beside its other public records.

OQRO reads the count per company and month, using the company name as the CFPB spells it, which is usually the legal name of the holding company. A company that files under several names in the database (a bank and its card subsidiary, for example) is counted under the name OQRO matched, and a company the Bureau lists under a name OQRO does not know is not counted at all. The month is the month the complaint was received, so the latest month fills in as complaints are published, and a month is only complete once every company has responded or the 15 days have run.

What this does not tell you

A count is a number of submissions in a month, not a number of violations, not a finding by the Bureau, and not a measure of how the complaints were resolved. A rise can reflect a product change, a news event, a data breach, a change in how the Bureau routes complaints, or growth in the company's customer base. The Bureau's enforcement actions are separate from the database and are not in the count. OQRO shows the record as published; it does not interpret it, and nothing here is investment advice.