Consumer complaint program

Learn how to access and respond to consumer complaints about your company.

Congress directed the Bureau to collect, monitor, and get responses to complaints about financial products and services. Since 2011, the CFPB's Office of Consumer Response has worked to get consumers timely responses from more than 6,100 financial companies.

Learn about the complaint process

Understand your company's role in the complaint process

Each consumer complaint goes through a five-step process. Learn about each step so you know what to expect, how to respond, and how complaints are reviewed, shared, and published.

Learn more about the complaint process

See the types of complaints we send to companies

We send consumers’ complaints about consumer financial products and services—including complaints referred to the CFPB by prudential regulators and other government agencies—to the CFPB-supervised bank or credit union or to the nonbank identified by the consumer.

Review the list of complaint types we send to companies

Respond to complaints

By statute, a primary function of the CFPB is to collect, investigate and respond to consumer complaints. Companies receive and respond to these complaints through the Company Portal, a secure online environment that protects consumer privacy and the confidentiality of company responses.

CFPB-supervised banks and credit unions

The CFPB sends complaints to banks or credit unions supervised by the CFPB. We refer complaints about banks and credit unions that are not supervised by the CFPB to the appropriate prudential federal regulator.

View list of CFPB-supervised banks and credit unions

Nonbank financial institutions

If you are a nonbank that provides consumer financial products and services, respond to complaints submitted to the CFPB by your customers by first getting access to your Company Portal.

Complete and submit the boarding form. Once we process your form, users authorized by your company will be able to log in using their company email address.

Sign up for the Company Portal

The CFPB expects companies to provide complete, accurate, and timely responses tailored to the issues described in each consumer’s complaint, generally within 15 calendar days.

Login to the Company Portal

Get complaint data and insights

Consumer Response analyzes consumer complaints, company responses, and consumer feedback to assess whether companies are providing accurate, complete, and timely responses.

This includes:

Reviewing cohorts of complaints and company responses to assess the accuracy, timeliness, and completeness of an individual company’s responses.
Conducting text analytics to identify emerging trends and statistical anomalies in large volumes of complaints.
Analyzing complaint volume across time and by product, issue, geographic area, as well as by self-identified characteristics, such as servicemember status and age.

Consumers’ complaints and companies’ responses provide the Bureau with important information about the types of challenges consumers are experiencing and the effectiveness of a company’s compliance management system.

Consistent with applicable law, the CFPB securely shares complaint information with other federal, state, and local agencies, including licensing authorities, to, among other things, facilitate supervision and enforcement activities and monitor the market for consumer financial products and services.

Learn more about how we share data

Complaints are published in the Consumer Complaint Database after a company responds, confirming a commercial relationship with the consumer, or after 15 days, whichever comes first. The CFPB also publishes the consumer’s narrative description of their experience if the consumer opts to share it publicly and after the Bureau takes steps to remove personal information.

View Consumer Complaint Database