The CFPB Complaint Vault

What This Is

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has collected consumer complaints about banks, lenders, credit bureaus and debt collectors since December 2011. The public database holds more than 18 million of them. In 2026 we downloaded it, together with the archive of complaint narratives published through the CFPB's FOIA Electronic Reading Room (complaints received up to 14 August 2026), and measured what is in it.

The Vault is the home of that work. Everything is open: the dataset has a DOI, every analytical decision is logged with its date and reasoning, and every figure on the site traces back to a table you can download.

A complaint in this database is a consumer's allegation. It is not a finding that a company broke the law, and company responses are self-reported and not verified by the CFPB.

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Start Here

The Numbers in Brief

• 18,167,713 complaints in the main database (1 December 2011 to 3 October 2026).
• 3,851,415 complaints with a published narrative (earliest: 19 March 2015; narrative archive ends 14 August 2026).
• Credit reporting rose from 20.4% of complaints in 2015 to 91.1% in 2026.
• 57.6% of all narratives (2015 to 2026) match at least one other narrative. Of all narratives: 42.4% original, 36.1% shared template, 21.4% the same person filing again.
• All figures on template detection are lower bounds: the matching threshold is deliberately conservative.

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The Data

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How We Did It

1. Two sources, joined by complaint ID (99.9% match on a 5,000-ID random sample).
2. Products harmonised into 11 families; credit reporting treated separately because it is 88.4% of 2025 complaints.
3. Template detection at three levels: exact duplicates, normalised duplicates, and fuzzy matches (MinHash with word 5-shingles, 128 permutations, Jaccard similarity of 0.8 or higher). Fuzzy groups are built within each calendar year.
4. Shared template versus same person: a text group counts as a shared template only if it spans at least two distinct locations. Otherwise it is classified as the same filer repeating.
5. Company comparisons use only complaints that are not known templates, within the same product family. Bank comparisons are stated per 100,000 deposit accounts of $250,000 or less, because three reasonable denominators gave three different rankings.

Read the full research log, with every decision and what we rejected →
Methodology section of the main investigation →

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What We Publish From This Data

Investigation

• The Copy-Paste Complaint: How Templates Took Over America's Financial Complaint Database

Real cases

The stories behind the numbers — six individual complaints, and three about shared templates.

Individual complaints

• A Zelle User Says the Bank Blamed Them Repeatedly, Then Closed Their Account Without Warning
• A Customer Says U.S. Bank Cleared a Stolen Check Twice, Then Refunded Only One
• A Servicemember Says Ford Credit Refused to Apply a State Interest-Rate Law to Their Loan
• A Consumer Says a Collector Keeps Calling About a Card They Closed in 2018
• A Customer Says Citizens Bank Denied a $300 Savings Bonus on Terms It Never Disclosed
• A Customer Says Bank of America Approved a $3,400 Fraud Refund, Then Reversed Its Decision

Shared templates

• The Complaint That Still Said "[ Credit Bureau Name ]"
• The Same Identity-Theft Message, Filed 33 Times From 21 Places Against Three Credit Bureaus
• One Letter, Three Credit Bureaus: The Complaint Addressed to Equifax and Filed Against All Three

Teaching materials

• Classroom exercise
• Teacher edition (PDF)
• Student sheet (PDF)

Tools to use in your own complaint

• How to Write a CFPB Complaint That Works
• Bank Complaint Letter Generator
• Credit Report Dispute Letter Generator (FCRA)
• Debt Collection Dispute Letter Generator
• Credit Report Error Checklist
• Debt Collection Response Checklist
• Unauthorized Transaction & Banking Fraud Checklist

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Code and Reproducibility

The analysis scripts (Python and DuckDB) are distributed inside the Zenodo archive (scripts.zip), with a requirements file and SHA-256 checksums. To reproduce a result, download the archive from the DOI and follow the README; the scripts read the CFPB files from a local folder.

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How to Cite

Dataset: Kibbo Research (2026). The CFPB Complaint Vault Dataset (Version 1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23188842

Investigation: Kibbo Research (2026). The Copy-Paste Complaint: How Templates Took Over America's Financial Complaint Database. getkibbo.com. https://www.getkibbo.com/investigations/cfpb-copy-paste-complaints

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Limits and Corrections

• A complaint is an allegation, not a violation. Company responses are self-reported and not verified by the CFPB.
• The CFPB stopped publishing new narratives after 14 August 2026; our narrative analysis ends there.
• CFPB does not publish filer identity. Our shared-template classification infers it from location and carries a small margin of error, documented in the research log.
• Findings about template outcomes are correlations, not causal effects.
• Companies named in our work can request a correction or add a response: hello@getkibbo.com. Corrections are logged on this page with their date.

Corrections log: No corrections to date.