The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is making changes to its consumer complaint portal.
Among the changes, the CFPB is:
- Revising its Portal Manual to ensure that credit reporting agencies follow a standardized process in addressing complaints.
- Enhancing identity protections.
- Aligning the complaint process to statutory obligations.
- Focusing resources on complaints that warrant a substantive response.
- Educating consumers about how to address errors on their credit reports.
- Increasing the efficiency of the complaint process.
The CFPB noted that credit reporting complaint volume increased dramatically in recent years. In 2019, the Bureau received more than 150,000 credit or consumer reporting complaints. In 2025, that number grew to more than 5 million—an increase of more than 3,700 percent. The nationwide consumer reporting agencies (NCRAs)—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—reported making more updates and deletions to inaccurate tradelines than in prior years. In 2024, the NCRAs closed more than 1.3 million complaints with non-monetary relief. In 2025, that number jumped to 2.1 million.
Credit reporting complaints represent the largest share of all complaints submitted to the CFPB. The increase is driven by several factors, including credit repair organizations and credit clinics misusing the bureau’s complaint process as a tool of their business. Further, the NCRAs have not been uniformly reporting how they respond to the consumer complaints. So the CFPB has been collaborating with the NCRAs to better understand their complaint handling practices to ensure that consumers receive responses to their credit reporting complaints.
To address the issues, the bureau is collaborating with NCRAs and other companies to implement the following changes.
Specifically, the CFPB issued a new Company Portal Manual that provides information on how companies should use the various response closure categories and answers to frequently asked questions. That will allow for standardization of data on responses across CRAs. Once the data can be standardized, the bureau will continue to work with CRAs to ensure data are consistent across them and response rates are appropriately high.
Also, the CFPB launched two-factor authentication, requiring users who create online accounts to verify both their email address and mobile phone number. It also added clarifying text and new relationship categories to emphasize that third parties must disclose their involvement in the complaint process. The CFPB plans to implement address validation at the complaint submission step to ensure companies can act on high-quality information.
Further, it added a notice, emphasizing that consumers must first exhaust their dispute rights directly with consumer reporting agencies before coming to the bureau. The bureau is working with the NCRAs to understand what information can help them more readily identify and review prior disputes. The bureau is also exploring adding an additional administrative response option so NCRAs can return complaints where the consumer has not exhausted their FCRA dispute obligations.
Also, the bureau is collaborating with NCRAs and other companies to provide greater specificity of when to use existing administrative response categories. It is also exploring additional administrative response categories, such as when a user appears to be abusing the complaint process.
Additionally, the bureau is developing educational resources and tools for consumers, including materials highlighting the costs and risks of credit repair and how to spot fraud and scams. It is also building technology, like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to more efficiently share complaint information with companies.
Finally, with record volume, the bureau is looking at which complaints should constitute a complaint backlog going forward. Most complaints are sent to companies or referred to another agency the same day they are received. For those that require manual review, the bureau is distinguishing routine work from complaints in the backlog to help ensure that it can prioritize its work and provide timely responses to consumers. The backlog will include complaints awaiting action for more than 30 calendar days from the date of submission.