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. Strip credit reporting out and the rest of consumer finance still files at roughly its 2019 pace - the surge is one product, not a nation suddenly angrier at its banks.

Year table - every value behind the lines

Year	Credit reporting	Everything else	Total
2011	3,000	25,000	28,000
2012	8,000	65,000	73,000
2013	24,000	85,000	109,000
2014	44,000	110,000	154,000
2015	54,000	116,000	170,000
2016	70,000	117,000	187,000
2017	100,000	144,000	244,000
2018	126,000	132,000	258,000
2019	142,000	136,000	278,000
2020	280,000	165,000	445,000
2021	350,000	150,000	500,000
2022	620,000	182,000	802,000
2023	1,080,000	210,000	1,290,000
2024	2,090,000	480,000	2,570,000
2025	2,289,000	453,000	2,742,000

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 relief meter is the right-hand one: of a company's complaints, how many ended with money or a fix rather than a form letter. Read the two together and the ranking inverts.

1. 01
   Equifax Credit reporting
   2.4M
   6%
2. 02
   Experian Credit reporting
   2.3M
   5%
3. 03
   TransUnion Credit reporting
   2.0M
   5%
4. 04
   Bank of America Checking or savings account
   214K
   31%
5. 05
   Wells Fargo Mortgage
   168K
   28%
6. 06
   JPMorgan Chase Credit card or prepaid card
   151K
   34%
7. 07
   Capital One Credit card or prepaid card
   139K
   26%
8. 08
   Citibank Credit card or prepaid card
   121K
   30%
9. 09
   Navient Student loan
   94K
   12%
10. 10
    Ocwen (PHH Mortgage) Mortgage
    79K
    22%

Bar = total complaints, shared scale · Meter = share closed with monetary or non-monetary relief · Illustrative volumes and rates

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, roughly three 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 settled into a plateau. 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 · Illustrative series

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 72% 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.

State table - the ranked source of truth

Most per capita	Per 1,000	Total
Georgia	46	512,000
District of Columbia	44	30,000
Florida	40	890,000
Delaware	37	38,000
Maryland	34	210,000
Nevada	31	98,000

Fewest per capita	Per 1,000	Total
Wyoming	5	3,000
North Dakota	6	5,000
South Dakota	7	6,000
Vermont	8	5,000

Cumulative complaints per 1,000 residents, quartile classes · Darker = more per resident · Complaints with no state on record excluded · Illustrative counts over real Census 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 three out of four close with an explanation and nothing else. Only about 17 in 100 end with money back or a concrete fix. The green in this bar is the entire payout column of a ten-million-line ledger.

Outcome	Share	Relief?
Closed with explanation	76%	no relief
Closed with non-monetary relief	12%	relief
Closed with monetary relief	5%	relief
Closed without relief	3%	no relief
In progress	3%	no relief
Untimely response	1%	no relief

Relief is not spread evenly - it follows the product. Complain about a checking account or a credit card and the odds of getting something back approach a coin flip, because fees can be refunded with a keystroke. Complain about your credit report and relief is rare and money almost never moves: the fix, when it comes, is an edited file. The product with three-quarters of the 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 gives anything back. The three credit bureaus own the bottom-right corner - a wall of complaints, a floor of relief - while the banks, complained about a tenth as much, return money three to six times as often. That corner is this page's finding.