About ComplaintRate
Why this exists
The CFPB Consumer Complaint Database contains over 9 million complaints filed against US financial institutions since 2011. It is one of the most comprehensive records of consumer financial harm ever assembled — and it has been almost entirely unusable by the people it was designed to help.
The raw database is a 14-million-row CSV file. The CFPB's own interface shows raw complaint counts without any normalisation. A bank with 10 million customers and 5,000 complaints looks worse than a bank with 100,000 customers and 4,000 complaints — even though the second bank is demonstrably worse by any fair measure.
ComplaintRate exists to fix that. We normalise every institution's complaint count by its estimated customer base, producing a rate that is directly comparable across institutions of any size. The result is a single, honest number: complaints per 1,000 customers.
What the data shows
Once you normalise the data, the findings are striking. Synchrony Financial — which issues credit cards for Amazon, PayPal, Google, and Lowe's — receives 22 times more complaints per customer than Goldman Sachs. Capital One receives 5 times more complaints per customer than JPMorgan Chase. Wells Fargo, despite years of headline-grabbing reputation efforts, still receives nearly twice as many complaints per customer as Chase.
None of this was visible in the raw data. It only becomes clear once you normalise.
A note on the CFPB
The CFPB database is a public record created under federal law. As of March 2026, the bureau faces significant political pressure that creates uncertainty about the long-term availability of this data. Our March 2026 snapshot represents the most complete, normalised, entity-resolved version of this record that has ever been assembled.
Regardless of what happens to the CFPB, this dataset — 14 years of complaint history, normalised and deduplicated — will remain available on ComplaintRate and available for download.
How the scores work
Complaint rates are calculated by dividing each institution's total CFPB complaints by its estimated customer count (derived from FDIC deposit data), then multiplying by 1,000. Full details of the formula, data sources, entity resolution process, and known limitations are on the methodology page.
Contact and press
For press inquiries, data licensing, or research collaboration, please use the data published on our data page. We respond to all serious inquiries.