Home → How we work
Where our numbers come from, what they cannot tell you, and who pays us.
Complaint figures come from the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, a public federal dataset containing 15,188,499 complaints filed since 2011. It is in the public domain, updates daily, and anyone can download it. We retrieved our current figures on 27 July 2026.
Complaints are published after the company responds, or after 15 days, whichever comes first. Roughly a quarter include the borrower’s own written account, published only where they consented and after personal details are removed.
Complaint volume tracks company size. A lender with millions of customers will collect more complaints than one with thousands, whatever the quality of either. That is why our headline metric is a rate, not a count.
Nothing here is verified. The CFPB does not investigate whether a borrower’s account is accurate, and neither do we. A complaint is an allegation, not a finding.
It is not a sample of anything. Most people who have a bad experience never file a complaint. Absence of complaints is not evidence of good treatment.
The share of a company’s complaints that end with money returned is the most useful figure available, because it is already adjusted for how many people complained. It lets you compare a national chain with a single-state lender fairly.
The average across all financial companies is 1.36%. A lender materially above that is resolving more disputes in the customer’s favour. One well below it is not. That is a real signal, and it costs nothing to publish.
We cite state rules to the statute or to the regulator’s own published materials, with the date checked, on every state page.
This matters more than it sounds. While building this site we found widely-published guides contradicting each other on which states even permit payday lending — three states appeared on one guide’s “outright ban” list and another guide’s “no rate cap at all” list. Both cannot be right. We do not cite other websites.
Every other site in this category is paid by lenders. We are a business too, so here is exactly where our money comes from. Check it against what we publish.
A flat fee when someone opens a Payday Alternative Loan. PALs are capped at 28% APR by federal rule. Flat, not a percentage — we earn the same whatever the amount.
Newsrooms, researchers and compliance teams pay for our structured complaint analysis. None of them are lenders and none have any say in what we publish.
Direct contributions. No paywall, ever — the crisis pages are the last thing that should sit behind one.
No advertising, no referral fees, no lead generation, no sponsored placement, and no payment to remove or soften a lender page. If a lender offers, we publish the offer.
If something here is wrong, tell us. We correct it, note that we corrected it, and date the correction. Nothing gets quietly edited. Every correction we have made is published here — including the ones where we were the ones who got it wrong.
We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. We do not lend, broker, or refer anyone to a high-cost loan. For your specific situation a non-profit credit counsellor or a legal aid office is the right call — both are normally free.