Who You Complained About

For its first decade the database grew like a government program: steadily. Then dispute-by-template hit the credit bureaus, and the line left the ceiling. Everything else in consumer finance grew too, but nowhere near as fast - the surge is overwhelmingly one product, not a nation suddenly angrier at all its banks.

Year table - every value behind the lines

Year	Credit reporting	Everything else	Total
2011	0	2,536	2,536
2012	1,873	70,495	72,368
2013	14,380	93,834	108,214
2014	29,238	123,671	152,909
2015	34,270	134,003	168,273
2016	44,080	147,214	191,294
2017	89,954	152,791	242,745
2018	111,596	145,537	257,133
2019	138,556	138,685	277,241
2020	283,716	160,498	444,214
2021	307,539	188,401	495,940
2022	604,181	196,076	800,257
2023	1,046,876	245,184	1,292,060
2024	2,365,589	368,690	2,734,279
2025	4,810,422	632,862	5,443,284

Ten names account for most of the register, and three of them are not banks. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion each draw more complaints than every bank on this list combined. But volume is only the left-hand column. The money-back meter is the right-hand one: of a company's complaints, how many ended with money back rather than a form letter or an edited file. Read the two together and the ranking inverts.

1. 01
   TRANSUNION INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS, INC. Credit reporting
   4.5M
   0%
2. 02
   EQUIFAX, INC. Credit reporting
   4.4M
   0%
3. 03
   Experian Information Solutions Inc. Credit reporting
   4.0M
   0%
4. 04
   BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION Checking or savings
   183K
   19%
5. 05
   JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. Checking or savings
   172K
   10%
6. 06
   WELLS FARGO & COMPANY Checking or savings
   171K
   8%
7. 07
   CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORPORATION Credit card
   167K
   7%
8. 08
   CITIBANK, N.A. Credit card
   138K
   17%
9. 09
   SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL Credit card
   81K
   14%
10. 10
    Resurgent Capital Services L.P. Debt collection
    71K
    0%

Bar = total complaints, shared scale · Meter = share closed with money back (monetary relief) · CFPB Consumer Complaint Database

One category swallows the database. Complaints about credit reports - the errors that quietly block a loan, a lease or a job - outnumber every other financial product combined, more than four to one. Everything a consumer would call banking (cards, accounts, mortgages, transfers) shares the remainder in single digits.

The categories do not move together, and that is the tell. Mortgage complaints have fallen almost every year since the foreclosure era. Debt collection held flat for a decade, then jumped. Credit cards and bank accounts climbed with fee disputes. Only credit reporting broke its axis - each panel below wears its own scale, so read the shapes, then read the peaks.

One panel per product, complaints received per year · Vertical scales are independent - the printed peak is each panel's ceiling · CFPB Consumer Complaint Database

Every filing ticks an issue box, and the boxes tell one story three ways. "Incorrect information on your report" alone outweighs every non-credit-reporting issue combined; add improper use and botched investigations and the three report-related boxes carry about 76% of the entire database. The rest of the form - debts not owed, account trouble, fraud - splits what remains.

Raw counts only restate the census - California and Texas file the most because the most people live there. Divide by residents and the map redraws itself around the Southeast, led by Georgia: Equifax's home state and, year after year, the place that files more complaints per person than anywhere else in the country. Credit-file friction, not coastal population, is what this map is shaded by.

Hover a state for its figures

State table - the ranked source of truth

Most per capita	Per 1,000	Total
Georgia	115	1,229,529
Florida	106	2,276,632
Mississippi	91	269,175
District of Columbia	84	58,052
Texas	78	2,270,209
Louisiana	78	364,019

Fewest per capita	Per 1,000	Total
South Dakota	8	7,054
Vermont	9	5,582
Montana	9	9,531
Idaho	10	19,213

Cumulative complaints per 1,000 residents, quartile classes · Darker = more per resident · Complaints with no state on record excluded · Real counts over U.S. Census (2020) populations

Nearly every complaint now arrives through a single door: the web form. That is the register's convenience and its blind spot in one - the people least likely to file online (older Americans, rural households, anyone without steady internet) are the least counted here, even when they are the most exposed. The fax line still gets used.

A response is not a remedy. Companies answer nearly every complaint by the deadline - the CFPB makes sure of that - but about three in five close with an explanation and nothing else. Only about 34 in 100 end with money back or a concrete fix. The green in this bar is the entire relief column of a sixteen-million-line ledger.

Outcome	Share	Relief?
Closed with explanation	60%	no relief
Closed with non-monetary relief	33%	relief
In progress	3%	no relief
Closed with monetary relief	1%	relief
Other outcomes	3%	no relief

Relief is not spread evenly - it follows the product. Complain about a credit card or a checking account and money actually moves for roughly one in six, because a fee can be refunded with a keystroke. Complain about your credit report and money almost never moves: the remedy, when it comes, is an edited file - real relief, but not a refund. The product with four in five of all complaints sits at the bottom of this chart.

Close the ledger with both columns on one chart. The further right a company sits, the more complaints it draws; the lower it sits, the less often it hands money back. The three credit bureaus own the bottom-right corner - a wall of complaints, and money back effectively never - while the banks, complained about a tenth as much, still return money in up to one in five cases. That corner is this page's finding.