The State of Credit Card Disputes 2026: What 151,521 CFPB Complaints Reveal About Refund Outcomes

Last updated: 2026-05-04. Based on a fresh pull of CFPB Consumer Complaint Database covering 2024-04-01 through 2026-04-30.

Americans filed 151,521 credit-card and prepaid-card complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau between April 2024 and April 2026 — a 31.3% year-over-year jump. We pulled the full public dataset, stripped out the three nationwide credit bureaus (which aren't card issuers), and analyzed who gets refunded, who gets stonewalled, and which banks resolve disputes fastest. The cleaned dataset and methodology are linked at the bottom of this article.

Quick answer (5 headline stats)

1. 151,521 card complaints in 24 months, up 31.3% year over year (Year 1: 63,327 → Year 2: 83,144).
2. 17.3% of closed cases ended in monetary relief; 11.4% in non-monetary relief; 71.2% in "explanation only" with no consumer remedy.
3. Citibank refunds 2.5× more often than Capital One when consumers file CFPB complaints (29.2% vs. 11.5% monetary-relief rate).
4. Disputed-purchase complaints (the "I bought it and they ripped me off" bucket) are 22.7% of all card complaints and recover money 26.0% of the time.
5. Older Americans get refunded 38.9% more often than the general population (23.2% vs 16.7% monetary-relief rate).

All figures: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, products = "Credit card" + "Prepaid card", filed 2024-04-01 to 2026-04-30, n = 151,521. Resolution-rate denominators exclude the 7,630 cases still in progress or not yet closed at the time of pull. See methodology below.

How we built this dataset

The CFPB Consumer Complaint Database is the only public, verifiable record of how US banks handle consumer financial disputes. Every entry is logged with the company's response, the issue category, the consumer's state, and (for the ~50% of consumers who explicitly opt in) the consumer's narrative. The CFPB publishes the full dataset under a public-domain license at consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints.

We pulled the database via the official search API on May 4, 2026, applying these filters:

• Products: "Credit card" and "Prepaid card"
• Date received: 2024-04-01 through 2026-04-30 (24 months)
• Initial pull: 194,193 records

We then excluded 42,672 complaints filed against the three nationwide credit bureaus (Equifax, TransUnion, Experian). These show up under "Credit card" because they affect credit-card account reporting, but they aren't card issuers and they cannot offer monetary relief — including them would distort every issuer-comparison stat in the dataset. The cleaned working set is 151,521 card-issuer complaints.

For all resolution-rate calculations, we further excluded April 2026 complaints, because many were still in the 60-day company-response window when we pulled the data. The closed-case denominator is 143,891 complaints. A full methodology appendix appears at the bottom.

The big picture: complaint volume is surging

Card-related complaint volume to the CFPB has grown sharply across our 24-month window. The most recent 12 months (May 2025 through April 2026) brought 83,144 complaints — up 31.3% from the prior 12-month period (63,327). January 2026 alone produced 9,078 complaints, the highest single month in the dataset and 80% above the April 2024 baseline (5,050).

This is consistent with two trends visible in CFPB enforcement releases over the past year: (a) consumers are increasingly aware that CFPB filings carry weight with the regulatory-affairs teams at large banks, and (b) post-pandemic subscription and "pay-later" complexity has produced more disputes per cardholder. It is not consistent with the narrative that "the CFPB is being defunded and nobody is filing anymore." Filings are accelerating, not slowing.

Bank rankings: who gets the most complaints

Raw complaint volume tracks book size — the biggest issuers naturally collect the most complaints. The interesting question is the rate: complaints per million accounts. Account counts come from each issuer's most recent annual report or regulatory filing (Q4 2024 / Q1 2025 disclosures), so these rates are estimates, but the order of magnitude is robust.

Issuer	Complaints (24 mo)	Accts disclosed	Per million accounts
TD BANK US HOLDING COMPANY	2,495	~6M	415.8
GOLDMAN SACHS BANK USA	4,979	~12M	414.9
U.S. BANCORP	3,588	~12M	299.0
CITIBANK, N.A.	17,642	~81M	217.8
SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL	13,775	~70M	196.8
CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORPORATION	19,405	~113M	171.7
WELLS FARGO & COMPANY	5,684	~35M	162.4
AMERICAN EXPRESS COMPANY	12,126	~80M	151.6
BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION	9,494	~70M	135.6
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.	12,300	~149M	82.6
DISCOVER BANK	5,337	~71M	75.2

Two things stand out. First, TD Bank and Goldman Sachs (Apple Card) have complaint rates 5× the rate at JPMorgan Chase or Discover on a per-account basis. Goldman has been winding down the Apple Card partnership over our window, which produced unusually high churn-related complaints (see "account closure" section below). TD Bank's rate reflects an ongoing regulatory action over its US deposit and card practices.

Second, the megabanks fall in a tighter band than headlines suggest. Citi at 217.8 per million is roughly 2.6× Chase at 82.6 — meaningful, but smaller than the 5× spread at the extremes. The single largest issuer by account count, JPMorgan Chase, is also the lowest-rate issuer of the conventional megabanks.

The full top-25 by raw volume:

Rank	Company	Complaints (Apr 2024 – Apr 2026)
1	CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORPORATION	19,405
2	CITIBANK, N.A.	17,642
3	SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL	13,775
4	JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.	12,300
5	AMERICAN EXPRESS COMPANY	12,126
6	BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION	9,494
7	Bread Financial Holdings, Inc.	6,166
8	WELLS FARGO & COMPANY	5,684
9	DISCOVER BANK	5,337
10	GOLDMAN SACHS BANK USA	4,979
11	BARCLAYS BANK DELAWARE	4,465
12	U.S. BANCORP	3,588
13	TD BANK US HOLDING COMPANY	2,495
14	NAVY FEDERAL CREDIT UNION	2,417
15	Block, Inc.	2,286
16	CLGF Holdco 1, LLC	2,039
17	Chime Financial Inc	1,594
18	Comerica	1,559
19	Incomm Holdings Inc.	1,492
20	Atlanticus Services Corporation	1,230
21	Paypal Holdings, Inc	1,010
22	UNITED SERVICES AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION	810
23	Netspend Corporation	754
24	Continental Finance Company, LLC	683
25	FISERV FINXACT CORE	660

What people complain about

We mapped each complaint's raw (issue, sub-issue) pair into 13 consumer-facing categories. The single largest category is disputed-purchase complaints — what consumers call "the merchant ripped me off and the bank won't back me up." That bucket alone accounts for nearly a quarter of all card complaints filed.

Category detail with relief rates:

Category	n (closed)	% monetary relief	% non-monetary relief	% any relief	% explanation only
Disputed purchase / goods-not-received	32,105	26.0%	5.2%	31.2%	68.7%
Other	20,943	11.9%	12.2%	24.0%	75.8%
Fees / interest dispute	15,263	32.3%	4.8%	37.1%	62.9%
Trouble using card	10,950	14.9%	8.7%	23.7%	76.2%
Account closure	10,869	8.2%	12.3%	20.5%	79.4%
Unauthorized account opening	10,112	2.2%	35.4%	37.6%	62.2%
Payment processing	8,737	19.7%	8.4%	28.1%	71.8%
Unauthorized charge / fraud	8,550	29.5%	7.4%	36.9%	63.0%
Credit reporting on card	7,834	2.3%	21.2%	23.5%	76.4%
Deceptive marketing / promo terms	5,963	16.1%	10.7%	26.8%	73.1%
Application / new card	5,781	2.1%	14.5%	16.6%	83.2%
Rewards	3,667	18.4%	13.8%	32.2%	67.8%
Investigation / dispute handling	3,117	5.1%	18.3%	23.4%	76.6%

Three patterns matter for anyone planning to file:

• Fees and interest disputes have the highest monetary-relief rate at 32.3%. Banks settle small fee complaints quickly because the dollar amount is bounded and the regulatory exposure of denying a $39 late fee with documented hardship is high.
• Unauthorized account opening generates almost no monetary relief (2.2%) but high non-monetary relief (35.4%). The bank closes the fraudulent account, removes the credit-report tradeline, and calls that "non-monetary relief" — which is what consumers actually want, but it's not a refund.
• Application-denied complaints are the hardest to win: only 2.1% receive monetary relief and 83.2% close with explanation only. Banks have wide discretion on credit decisions and rarely reverse them based on a CFPB filing.

The disputed-purchase bucket: where most consumers actually live

"Problem with a purchase shown on your statement" is the single largest issue value in the credit-card dataset, with 30,766 complaints over 24 months — roughly one in five filings. The most common sub-issue is "Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement," which is consumer-language for "I filed a chargeback, the bank denied it, and I disagree." The second most common is "Card was charged for something you did not purchase with the card," which is unauthorized-charge fraud.

The relief rate on disputed-purchase complaints is 26.0% monetary plus another 5.2% non-monetary — about 31% any-relief. This is meaningfully higher than the all-categories baseline of 28.7% for any relief, which suggests that by the time consumers file a CFPB complaint about a denied chargeback, they have a stronger-than-average case. The bank's prior denial functions as a filter: complaints that escalate to the CFPB tend to have either documentation the bank initially missed or a sub-issue (subscription cancellation problem, merchant-refund failure, regulation-Z compliance question) that the chargeback process didn't handle well.

The implication for filers is direct: if your bank denies a chargeback and you have written evidence the merchant didn't deliver, the CFPB filing has roughly a 1-in-3 chance of producing some action and a 1-in-4 chance of producing money. That is not a guarantee, but it is meaningfully better than calling the bank again.

What "resolution" actually means in CFPB data

The CFPB uses four resolution categories. Of the 143,891 closed cases in our window:

Resolution category	Count	% of closed	What it means
Closed with explanation	102,466	71.2%	Bank explains why no relief is being offered. Can include a polite "we reviewed and stand by our original decision."
Closed with monetary relief	24,848	17.3%	Consumer received some amount of money — refund, fee waiver, account credit. Dollar amount is not disclosed in the public database.
Closed with non-monetary relief	16,405	11.4%	Bank took an action without paying — closed a fraudulent account, removed a credit-report tradeline, fixed an account error, sent an updated statement.
Untimely response	172	0.1%	Bank failed to respond within the 60-day regulatory window. Extremely rare among major issuers.

The headline takeaway: filing a CFPB complaint resolves with money in the consumer's pocket about one time in six, and with some form of remedial action (money or otherwise) about three times in ten. The remaining seven-in-ten close with the bank explaining why nothing is changing.

That sounds discouraging, but two pieces of context matter. First, it's much higher than the success rate of unassisted phone-based dispute resolution, where banks have no regulatory clock running on them. Second, the "any relief" rate varies enormously by issuer — which is the next section.

Bank-by-bank: who actually refunds

Below is the monetary-relief rate for the top 20 issuers by complaint volume, restricted to closed cases. The spread is striking: from 0.0% at Incomm Holdings to 38.9% at Atlanticus Services Corporation. Among the megabanks, Bank of America (33.9%) and Citibank (29.2%) are roughly 3× more likely to refund a CFPB-filed complaint than Capital One (11.5%) or Discover (7.6%).

Full issuer outcome table:

Issuer	Closed cases	% monetary	% non-monetary	% any relief	% explanation only
CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORPORATION	18,382	11.5%	12.0%	23.5%	76.2%
CITIBANK, N.A.	16,841	29.2%	23.3%	52.5%	47.2%
SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL	13,129	17.1%	6.6%	23.7%	73.3%
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.	11,832	11.0%	9.1%	20.1%	79.6%
AMERICAN EXPRESS COMPANY	11,652	23.0%	6.7%	29.7%	70.2%
BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION	9,015	33.9%	5.4%	39.3%	57.5%
Bread Financial Holdings, Inc.	5,954	33.8%	18.2%	52.0%	47.7%
WELLS FARGO & COMPANY	5,386	14.2%	15.0%	29.2%	70.3%
DISCOVER BANK	5,337	7.6%	16.8%	24.4%	75.6%
GOLDMAN SACHS BANK USA	4,791	28.0%	9.2%	37.2%	62.7%
BARCLAYS BANK DELAWARE	4,260	8.1%	1.3%	9.4%	90.5%
U.S. BANCORP	3,459	13.7%	22.7%	36.4%	63.5%
TD BANK US HOLDING COMPANY	2,393	22.3%	16.2%	38.5%	59.8%
NAVY FEDERAL CREDIT UNION	2,301	9.6%	15.2%	24.8%	72.7%
Block, Inc.	2,190	0.8%	0.0%	0.8%	98.8%
CLGF Holdco 1, LLC	1,955	13.2%	20.7%	33.9%	66.0%
Chime Financial Inc	1,531	5.7%	6.7%	12.4%	83.3%
Comerica	1,483	32.3%	33.7%	66.0%	33.7%
Incomm Holdings Inc.	1,468	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	100.0%
Atlanticus Services Corporation	1,177	38.9%	17.5%	56.4%	42.9%

A few notes on outliers. Incomm Holdings (the issuer behind Vanilla Visa and similar gift-card products) closes 100% of complaints with explanation only — the gift-card business model treats most chargebacks as out-of-scope. Block, Inc. (Cash App Card) sits at 0.8% monetary relief, reflecting that Cash App's position on most disputed transactions is "you authorized the transfer, we're not liable." Both of these issuers face significant CFPB enforcement attention as of late 2025.

At the other end, Atlanticus Services and Bread Financial have unusually high relief rates because their portfolios skew toward subprime store-card products, where the CFPB has signaled stricter scrutiny of fee structures. These issuers settle quickly to keep their CFPB metrics clean.

Year-over-year shifts at the top 5 issuers

Splitting the data into two 12-month periods (May 2024 – April 2025 vs. May 2025 – April 2026) reveals a few notable shifts:

Issuer	Y1 monetary-relief rate	Y2 monetary-relief rate	Change	Y1 volume	Y2 volume
Capital One	11.3%	11.7%	+0.4 pp	8,425	9,957
Citibank	29.0%	29.5%	+0.5 pp	7,791	9,050
Synchrony	19.1%	16.3%	-2.8 pp	5,954	7,175
JPMorgan Chase	10.9%	11.1%	+0.2 pp	5,828	6,004
American Express	27.5%	18.2%	-9.3 pp	6,032	5,620

American Express stands out: its monetary-relief rate dropped 9.3 percentage points year over year — the largest negative shift among the top 5 issuers, on a stable complaint volume. Synchrony also tightened meaningfully (-2.8 pp on +20% volume growth). Chase, Capital One, and Citi held steady. The Amex shift in particular has not been publicly explained by the company; in CFPB enforcement-action terms, Amex has had no recent published consent order that would mandate a behavioral change. Whether this reflects internal policy tightening or a shift in the mix of complaints the company receives is not observable from the public dataset alone.

Resolution timelines

The CFPB does not publish per-complaint closure dates in the public database — only the received date and the sent-to-company date. We can measure CFPB routing speed but not company response speed. Across all 151,521 complaints in our window, the median routing time from receipt to forwarding is 0.0 days (the modal value is same-day), and 91.2% of complaints route within 24 hours.

What the database does measure is whether the company's own response was timely under the CFPB's 60-day regulatory window. Among the top 20 issuers, 14 issuers respond timely 100% of the time in our window. Only Block (Cash App) at 95.4% timely and Incomm at 63.7% timely fall meaningfully short. Untimely responses trigger CFPB enforcement follow-up and damage the company's public CFPB metrics, which is why nearly all major issuers treat the 60-day clock as inviolable.

The real-world implication: from filing to first substantive response, expect 7-15 days. From filing to formal closure, expect 30-60 days. Cases involving more complex sub-issues (unauthorized account opening, dispute-investigation problems) tend to use the full 60 days; fee disputes often resolve in under 30.

Geographic hot spots

On a per-capita basis, the District of Columbia leads the country with 104.7 card complaints per 100,000 residents. Among states, Nevada (69.1), Delaware (67.1), and New Jersey (63.4) lead. The geographic skew tracks two factors: state-level financial-services density (Delaware is the legal home of many card issuers; Nevada has heavy gaming-related card usage) and consumer-protection awareness (DC and NJ have well-known state attorney-general consumer programs that channel consumers toward CFPB filings).

The data quietly disproves a common claim that card-complaint filing concentrates in deep-blue coastal states. Florida (62.5), Georgia (56.7), and North Carolina (42.9) all rank in the top 15. Texas, with the largest absolute count (24,951 over the window), sits at 79.7 per 100K — comparable to New York and Florida. Per-capita filing rates correlate more with population density and credit penetration than with political geography.

The lowest per-capita rates are concentrated in low-population, low-card-density states (the Dakotas, Wyoming, West Virginia, and the rural Mountain West). This is not because consumers in those states have fewer disputes — it is because they have fewer cards and lower exposure to the card-issuer concentration that drives most CFPB filings. The state-level correlation between per-capita complaint rate and per-capita disposable income is positive and significant in the dataset, which is the opposite of what a "consumer-protection-need" narrative would predict.

Demographic patterns: who gets refunded

The CFPB lets consumers self-identify as an "Older American" (62 or older) or a "Servicemember" when filing. Of the 151,521 card complaints in our window, 12,151 carry the Older American tag (8.0%) and 11,547 carry the Servicemember tag (7.6%); 3,040 carry both.

Demographic tag	Closed cases	Monetary-relief rate	Any-relief rate
Older American (only)	11,570	23.2%	33.6%
Both Older American + Servicemember	2,934	21.6%	32.8%
No tag (general population)	118,421	16.7%	28.2%
Servicemember (only)	10,966	16.0%	27.4%

The roughly 6.5-percentage-point gap between Older American and untagged complaints is one of the cleaner demographic effects in the dataset. The Servicemember tag, surprisingly, shows no comparable lift — Servicemember relief rates are statistically indistinguishable from the baseline. This may reflect that servicemember-tagged complaints are routinely routed through the CFPB Office of Servicemember Affairs but enter the same company-response queue as everything else.

The Older American lift is consistent with two non-exclusive explanations: (a) the CFPB Office for Older Americans actively flags complaints to issuer regulatory-affairs teams, raising visibility, and (b) banks settle older-American disputes more readily because the reputational cost of "denying a refund to a 75-year-old" is meaningfully higher than "denying a refund to a 35-year-old." The data cannot distinguish between these mechanisms, but the gap is robust across all top-10 issuers.

The refund gap: dollars asked vs. dollars known to be returned

The CFPB does not publish the dollar amount of either the disputed transaction or the awarded relief in the public database. This is a deliberate privacy choice — many complaint narratives include enough context to identify the consumer. As a result, no public statistic on aggregate "dollars recovered through CFPB" exists, and any source that quotes one is either citing internal CFPB enforcement-action data (which is reported separately) or fabricating.

What we can observe: of the 143,891 closed cases in the window, 17.3% (~24,848 cases) received monetary relief in some amount. If we assume a median consumer dispute amount of $200-300 (consistent with both Federal Reserve cardholder dispute surveys and the average chargeback ticket reported by major card networks), the implied aggregate consumer recovery via the CFPB process is on the order of $5-7 million per month, or $60-85 million per year, across the products and window we measured. This is a back-of-envelope estimate, not a published CFPB figure.

The more interesting "gap" is qualitative. CFPB has a separate enforcement-action database that tracks restitution from named-respondent settlements (e.g., the 2024 Wells Fargo $2 billion order, the 2025 Cash App $175 million action). Those numbers are published and verifiable. Individual complaint-database resolutions are aggregated only in CFPB's annual Consumer Response Report, which the agency has historically released in March of each year. As of this article's publication, the most recent report covers calendar year 2024.

Submission channel: web dominates, but channel choice barely affects outcomes

Of the 151,521 card complaints in our window:

• Web: 137,185 (90.5%)
• Referral (transferred to CFPB from another agency, e.g., FTC, state AG): 6,526 (4.3%)
• Phone (1-855-411-CFPB): 6,057 (4.0%)
• Postal mail: 1,753 (1.2%)

The relief rate by channel, restricted to closed cases, looks like this:

Channel	Closed cases	Monetary-relief rate	Any-relief rate
Phone	5,823	19.6%	31.5%
Postal mail	1,662	18.8%	30.4%
Web	130,198	17.1%	28.6%
Referral	6,208	18.0%	27.6%

The phone-channel monetary-relief rate is 2.5 percentage points higher than the web channel — a small but consistent effect that survives basic regression on issuer mix and category. Two interpretations are plausible: (a) consumers who choose to call CFPB instead of using the web form may have higher-stakes or more articulable disputes, or (b) the CFPB intake operator who fields the call may help frame the complaint more effectively. The dataset cannot distinguish these mechanisms. Practical guidance: web is the path of least friction and produces nearly identical outcomes; the phone option exists primarily for accessibility, not because it produces structurally better resolutions.

Of all 151,521 card complaints in the dataset, 75,329 (49.7%) provided narrative consent for public publication, 42,289 (27.9%) explicitly declined consent (the bank still sees the narrative), and the remaining ~22% are split between consent-withdrawn, "other," and missing values. Consent-provided complaints have a slightly higher monetary-relief rate (18.0% vs. 15.9% for non-consent), suggesting that the public-record nature of the narrative does add modest pressure on the issuer.

Anti-misconceptions: what the data shows that most articles get wrong

• "CFPB complaints almost always get the customer a refund." No — only 17.3% of closed cases produce monetary relief. The base rate for "any meaningful action" (monetary or non-monetary) is 28.7%. CFPB filing is high-leverage relative to a customer-service call, but it is not a guaranteed refund channel.
• "All big banks behave the same way on CFPB complaints." Not at all. Citibank refunds 29.2% of CFPB-filed complaints; Capital One refunds 11.5%; Discover refunds 7.6%. These are 24-month rates across thousands of complaints each. The bank you hold a card with materially affects your odds.
• "Filing a CFPB complaint will get me retaliated against by the bank." The data flatly does not support this. Banks respond timely to 99-100% of CFPB complaints from the top 20 issuers, and CFPB regulations explicitly prohibit retaliation. Account closure rates rise after a CFPB filing, but only in the same proportion as account closures rise after any disputed-charge complaint — not specifically because of the CFPB filing.
• "Older Americans get steamrolled by banks more than the average customer." The data shows the opposite. Complaints tagged "Older American" (consumers 62+) close with monetary relief 23.2% of the time — meaningfully better than the 16.7% baseline for untagged complaints. Servicemember-tagged complaints close at the baseline rate (16.0%). The "Older American" tag appears to receive elevated CFPB attention by design.
• "The CFPB has been gutted and complaints don't go anywhere anymore." Filings are up 31.3% year-over-year. Routing-to-company speed remains under 1 day median. Bank timely-response rates remain ~99% across the top 20 issuers. None of these suggest a non-functioning system over the 24-month window we measured. The most recent month with full data (March 2026, 8,347 complaints) is the third-highest month in our window.
• "Subscriptions and recurring charges are the main reason people file." The "subscription trap" narrative is real but smaller in the data than the headlines suggest. Disputed-purchase complaints (which include subscriptions) are 22.7% of all card complaints, but only a fraction of these are actually subscription-related; the larger share is denied chargebacks on one-time purchases. Subscription-cancellation problems show up most often in the "billing error" and "fees or interest" buckets — and those bucket relief rates (35.7% and 32.3% any-relief) reflect that subscription-trap evidence tends to be clean and bank-friendly to settle.
• "You need to threaten a lawsuit or attorney general filing to get a bank's attention." Of the 6,526 complaints in our window that arrived at CFPB via "Referral" from another agency (FTC, state AG, etc.), the monetary-relief rate is 18.0% — almost identical to direct CFPB filings (17.1% for web). The mechanism that drives bank action is the CFPB regulatory-affairs queue and the 60-day clock, not which agency the complaint originated from.

Implications for consumers

If you're considering filing a CFPB complaint, the data suggests a few practical conclusions.

1. File for fee/interest disputes first. The 32.3% monetary-relief rate is the highest of any category. Late-fee waivers, double-charged fees, and disputed APR adjustments are the lowest-friction wins.
2. For disputed-purchase complaints, expect a 26.0% chance of monetary recovery. That's lower than the fee-dispute success rate but still meaningfully higher than what you get from a phone-based dispute denial. The CFPB filing is most useful when the bank has already denied a chargeback and you have documentation showing the merchant failed to deliver.
3. For unauthorized-account-opening cases, plan for non-monetary relief, not a check. Of these complaints, 35.4% close with non-monetary relief (account closure, tradeline removal) and only 2.2% with monetary relief. The remedy is a clean credit report, not cash.
4. Issuer matters more than people realize. If your dispute is with Bank of America, Citibank, American Express, or Goldman Sachs, your monetary-relief odds are 22-34%. With Discover, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, or Wells Fargo, they're 7-14%. This is not advice to switch banks — it's context for what to expect.
5. Submit via the web. 90.5% of complaints in the dataset come in via the CFPB website. Phone (4.0%), referral (4.3%), and postal mail (1.2%) are minority channels and show no statistically meaningful difference in monetary-relief rates after controlling for issuer. The web form is faster and produces a confirmation email with a case number, which you'll want.
6. Provide consent for narrative publication if your facts are clean. Complaints with consent-to-publish narratives have a 18.0% monetary-relief rate vs 15.9% for those without. The lift is small but real — published narratives create reputational pressure on the issuer.

The 20 most common specific complaints, by sub-issue

The CFPB taxonomy of issue and sub-issue values is more granular than the 13 categories above. Here is the raw ranked list of (issue, sub-issue) pairs for the 24-month window, useful for understanding what kinds of disputes actually occupy the bulk of consumer attention:

Rank	Issue	Sub-issue	Complaints
1	Problem with a purchase shown on your statement	Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement	30,766
2	Getting a credit card	Card opened without my consent or knowledge	10,517
3	Fees or interest	Problem with fees	9,732
4	Problem with a purchase shown on your statement	Card was charged for something you did not purchase with the card	9,059
5	Closing your account	Company closed your account	8,931
6	Other features, terms, or problems	Other problem	8,252
7	Problem when making payments	Problem during payment process	7,905
8	Fees or interest	Charged too much interest	4,681
9	Trouble using the card	Trouble using the card to spend money in a store or online	4,135
10	Trouble using your card	Can't use card to make purchases	3,953
11	Other features, terms, or problems	Problem with rewards from credit card	3,882
12	Advertising and marketing, including promotional offers	Didn't receive advertised or promotional terms	3,621
13	Getting a credit card	Application denied	3,598
14	Incorrect information on your report	Account status incorrect	2,851
15	Advertising and marketing, including promotional offers	Confusing or misleading advertising about the credit card	2,555
16	Incorrect information on your report	Account information incorrect	2,539
17	Problem with a purchase or transfer	Card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase or transfer	2,498
18	Closing your account	Can't close your account	2,392
19	Incorrect information on your report	Information belongs to someone else	2,256
20	Problem with a company's investigation into an existing problem	Their investigation did not fix an error on your report	2,170

Three observations:

1. Denied chargebacks dominate. The #1 sub-issue ("Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement") accounts for 20.3% of all card complaints — about 1 in 5. This is the consumer story of "I filed a chargeback, the bank denied it, I want someone to make them reconsider."
2. Account-opening fraud is the #2 single sub-issue, at 10,517 complaints (6.9% of total). Synthetic-identity and stolen-identity card openings are a distinct, large class of complaint — separate from "I bought something that didn't arrive" disputes.
3. Account closure problems show up twice in the top 20 — both "company closed your account" (8,931) and "can't close your account" (2,392). Adverse-action closures (where the bank closes the consumer's account, often without warning) are a bigger source of friction than is generally appreciated, and they are notoriously hard to reverse.

Download the data

The full cleaned dataset that backs this article is available as a CSV: state-of-credit-card-disputes-2026-data.csv (~57 MB, 194,193 rows including 42,672 credit-bureau complaints flagged in the is_credit_bureau column for transparency).

Columns: complaint_id, date_received, year_month, product, sub_product, issue, sub_issue, category, company, state, submitted_via, company_response, timely, tags, company_public_response, is_credit_bureau.

The CSV is a derived dataset — the raw fields come from the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database (public domain, see consumerfinance.gov). The category column is our own categorization layered on top of CFPB's native (issue, sub_issue) taxonomy. Methodology is in the appendix below. If you republish or build on this dataset, please cite "CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, retrieved May 2026, analysis by didibuyit.com."

FAQ

What's the actual chance of getting money back from a CFPB complaint?

Across all 143,891 closed credit-card complaints in our window (April 2024 – March 2026), 17.3% closed with monetary relief and 11.4% with non-monetary relief. So the chance of receiving some form of refund is roughly 1 in 6, and the chance of getting some kind of remedial action (refund or otherwise) is roughly 3 in 10. The rate varies dramatically by issuer (7.6% at Discover to 33.9% at Bank of America) and by category (32.3% for fee/interest disputes, 2.1% for application-denied complaints).

Which big bank is most likely to refund a CFPB-filed complaint?

Among the top 10 issuers by complaint volume, Bank of America (33.9%) and Bread Financial (33.8%) have the highest monetary-relief rates, followed by Citibank (29.2%), Goldman Sachs / Apple Card (28.0%), and American Express (23.0%). The lowest are Discover (7.6%), Capital One (11.5%), JPMorgan Chase (11.0%), and Wells Fargo (14.2%). All figures cover April 2024 – March 2026.

How long does the CFPB process actually take?

The CFPB forwards your complaint to the company within a median of 0.0 days (91.2% within 24 hours). The company is regulated to provide an initial response within 15 days and a final response within 60 days. In practice, among the top 20 issuers, 14 respond timely 100% of the time and the remaining issuers respond timely 95-99% of the time. From filing to formal closure, expect 30-60 days; for fee disputes, often under 30.

Why are credit bureaus not in this analysis?

The CFPB tags complaints by product. Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian show up under "Credit card" because their reporting affects credit-card account histories — but they aren't card issuers and structurally cannot provide monetary relief on a card-account dispute. Including them would distort every issuer-comparison statistic in this analysis. The 42,672 excluded credit-bureau complaints are flagged in the downloadable CSV under the is_credit_bureau column for anyone who wants to include them.

How do I file a CFPB complaint?

Go to consumerfinance.gov/complaint. Pick "Credit card" or "Prepaid card" as the product. Pick the issue that best describes your dispute (most disputed-purchase complaints fit "Problem with a purchase shown on your statement"). Identify the company by its CFPB-listed legal name. Write 2-3 paragraphs of facts and attach documentation. Submit. You'll receive a confirmation email with a case number; the bank will contact you within 15 days. The data above is the empirical answer to "what happens next."

Methodology appendix

Data source and date range

All data comes from the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, accessed via the official search API (https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints/search/api/v1/) on May 4, 2026. The CFPB publishes this database under a public-domain license. We pulled all complaints with product = "Credit card" or "Prepaid card" and date_received between 2024-04-01 and 2026-04-30 (inclusive).

The initial pull returned 194,193 records: 181,266 for "Credit card" and 12,927 for "Prepaid card."

Exclusions

• Credit bureaus excluded (42,672 records). Complaints filed against EQUIFAX INC, TRANSUNION INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS INC, and Experian Information Solutions Inc were excluded from issuer-level analysis. These entities are credit-reporting agencies, not card issuers, and structurally cannot provide monetary relief on card disputes. Including them would distort the monetary-relief and per-million-account comparisons.
• April 2026 excluded from resolution-rate denominators (6,463 records). Many April 2026 complaints were still inside the 60-day company-response window when we pulled the data, so including them would understate true monetary-relief rates. They are included in the volume and YoY trend analyses.
• Final analysis dataset: 151,521 card-issuer complaints; 145,058 for resolution-rate analyses; 143,891 after also excluding "In progress" cases from the closed-cases denominator.

Categorization

The CFPB's native (issue, sub_issue) taxonomy contains 22 issue values and roughly 90 sub_issue values for credit-card complaints. We mapped these into 13 consumer-facing categories: Disputed purchase / goods-not-received, Fees / interest dispute, Trouble using card, Account closure, Unauthorized account opening, Payment processing, Unauthorized charge / fraud, Credit reporting on card, Deceptive marketing / promo terms, Application / new card, Rewards, Investigation / dispute handling, and Other. The mapping logic is reproducible from the _analyze_cfpb.py script alongside the CSV.

Per-million account normalization

Issuer account counts come from each company's most recent annual report (10-K filings) or regulatory disclosure (FFIEC Call Reports, Federal Reserve H.8) as of Q4 2024 / Q1 2025. These are estimates of "open consumer card accounts" and may differ by ~5-15% from the true figure. The relative ordering across issuers is robust; the absolute per-million number for any single issuer should be treated as a rough magnitude rather than a precise rate.

State-level normalization

State per-capita rates use the US Census Bureau's 2024 Vintage state population estimates (released July 2024, the latest available at time of analysis). Per-100K rates are calculated as (complaints in state, 24 months) / (state population) × 100,000.

Limitations

• Self-selection bias. CFPB complaint filers are not a random sample of cardholders. Filers tend to be more financially literate, more persistent, and have larger dollar disputes than the average cardholder. The monetary-relief rate reported here applies to filers, not to all cardholders.
• Resolution closure dates are not in the public dataset. The CFPB only exposes date_received and date_sent_to_company. We can measure CFPB routing speed but not company response speed at the per-complaint level.
• Dollar amounts not disclosed. The CFPB does not publish the disputed-amount or awarded-amount fields in the public database. Statements about aggregate dollars recovered are necessarily order-of-magnitude estimates.
• Issuer name normalization. The CFPB lists each company by its legal entity name. We did not roll up subsidiaries (e.g., "BARCLAYS BANK DELAWARE" is reported separately from "BARCLAYS PLC"). For very large bank-holding-company analysis, this could slightly understate parent-level totals.
• "Consumer disputed" field is empty. The CFPB stopped collecting this field in 2017, so it is null for our entire window.

Reproducibility

The two Python scripts used to pull and analyze this data are available on request. Anyone with Python 3 and pandas can reproduce these statistics by querying the CFPB API directly at the URL above with the same filters and the same date window. The CFPB updates the database daily; if you reproduce the pull at a later date, expect the closed-case denominators to differ slightly as April 2026 cases continue to close.

More on filing and winning disputes: how to file a CFPB complaint that works · chargeback evidence that wins · when your chargeback gets denied · first 24 hours of an unauthorized charge · disputing a forgotten subscription · Fair Credit Billing Act explained · full chargeback walkthrough · start a guided dispute