Complaint Volume Spikes Despite CFPB Inactivity

Complaint volumes to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are hitting record highs across markets, including auto finance and credit reporting, even as the agency’s public enforcement and rulemaking activity has slowed noticeably.​

What the headline refers to

• An industry piece titled “Complaint volume spikes despite CFPB inactivity (Under the Hood)”reports that auto finance complaints to the CFPB jumped about 55% in 2025 versus 2024 and 2023, rising to more than 20,000 from roughly 13,000 in the prior two years.​

• Over the same period, the article notes that CFPB enforcement and rulemaking have been “stalled for nearly a year,” leading to a perception of relative inactivity on the public enforcement front.​

Broader complaint trends

• Across all products, CFPB complaint volumes have surged: one analysis using the CFPB database shows complaints climbing from about 800,000 in 2022 to over 1 million in 2023 and then to roughly 2.61 million in 2025, an 88% year‑over‑year increase.​

• A separate review highlights that between January 2024 and June 2025 the CFPB received more than 5.6 million complaints, nearly 4.8 million of which involved credit and consumer reporting, with complaints against the three nationwide credit reporting agencies up nearly 3,000% since January 2020.​

Why complaints are spiking

• Credit and consumer reporting issues dominate the growth, including disputes over inaccuracies, identity theft, and failures to correct errors; in 2023 and 2024, these categories became the majority of all complaints, with 2023 alone seeing about 1.3 million consumer reporting complaints.​

• Commentators also point to drivers like more digital‑payment disputes, aggressive debt collection tactics, and increased consumer awareness of the CFPB’s online complaint portal, which together are pushing total complaints to record levels.​

“Inactivity” versus supervisory pressure

• Although public enforcement actions have declined at various points (for example, prior analyses have documented stretches with only a handful of actions under certain leadership periods), experts note that non‑public supervisory activity can remain robust even when headline enforcement counts drop.​

• Recent compliance commentary stresses that the CFPB actively uses complaint spikes as a supervisory signal and expects institutions to monitor and address complaint trends internally, meaning firms can still face significant regulatory pressure despite fewer visible actions.​