Four buy now, pay later companies, Affirm, Klarna, Sezzle and Zip, drew 11,375 CFPB complaints between October 2025 and September 2026, up 104% from 5,566 the year before. All four grew faster than the 46.4% rise in all CFPB complaints. Affirm had the most, 8,310. Klarna's count more than tripled and Zip's tripled, though both started from small numbers. The complaints are unverified.
How BNPL complaints are filed
The CFPB has no separate product for buy now, pay later. Consumers file these complaints under whatever fits best, and the database shows that spread. Of Affirm's 8,310 complaints, 2,877 were about credit reporting, 2,738 about debt collection and 2,089 about the loan itself, filed under personal and installment loans. Credit reporting is a newer source of BNPL complaints, as some lenders, Affirm among them, now report pay-over-time loans to the credit bureaus.
Afterpay is not listed here because the CFPB files its complaints under its parent, Block, Inc., which also owns Cash App. Block had 15,994 complaints in the latest 12 months, down from 45,360, but most are about Cash App payments: 10,070 were money transfer complaints and only 379 were filed under personal or installment loans, the product that would include Afterpay. There is no reliable way to separate Afterpay from the rest of Block, so we leave it out of the totals. PayPal's Pay in 4 is excluded for the same reason.
Complaints by company
| Company | Complaints, Oct 2025-Sep 2026 | Oct 2024-Sep 2025 | Change | Vs. all complaints (+46.4%) | Top product | Top issue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Affirm | 8,310 | 4,531 | +83.4% | +37.0 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
| Klarna | 1,965 | 526 | +273.6% | +227.2 pts | Payday loan, title loan, personal loan, or advance loan | Incorrect information on your report |
| Sezzle | 828 | 420 | +97.1% | +50.8 pts | Debt collection | Incorrect information on your report |
| Zip | 272 | 89 | +205.6% | +159.3 pts | Payday loan, title loan, personal loan, or advance loan | Problem when making payments |
Company names are shown in plain form; the CSV also gives the exact name each company is filed under in the CFPB database. Top product and top issue are for October 2025 to September 2026. "n/a" means the company had no complaints in the earlier period.
What the complaints are about
For Zip, the most common issue was trouble making payments, followed by disputes over a purchase shown on the statement. Those were also Klarna's second and third issues, after incorrect information on a credit report. For Affirm and Sezzle the leading issue was incorrect information on a credit report, and debt collection complaints grew quickly at both: Sezzle's rose from 88 to 283.
Growth in complaints partly tracks growth in lending: more borrowers mean more complaints even if the share of unhappy customers stays the same. The companies do not publish comparable counts of U.S. borrowers, so we cannot calculate a complaint rate.
What these numbers are
These are complaints, not findings. The CFPB forwards each complaint to the company and publishes it, but it does not verify the facts in it. One person can file several complaints, and the product and issue are the categories the consumer picked. A company's count also depends on how many customers it has, so a large lender will draw more complaints than a small one without being worse.
The baseline matters. All complaints to the CFPB rose 46.4%, from 4,800,965 to 7,026,722, between the two 12-month periods, and most of that growth was in credit reporting. A company whose complaints grew by less than 46% lost ground against the database as a whole, even if its own count went up. The "vs. all complaints" column shows the gap in percentage points.
Source
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Complaint Database, complaints received October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026 and October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025, filtered by the company name as the CFPB lists it, queried through the public API on October 23, 2026. Block, Inc. product counts are shown for context. U.S. government data in the public domain. Changes, shares and comparisons with the all-complaints baseline are our calculations. Our tables are available under CC BY 4.0. Credit "My Credit Guide (mycreditguide.org)".
Steven Reynolds, "Buy Now, Pay Later Complaints by Company," My Credit Guide, October 23, 2026, https://mycreditguide.org/data/bnpl-company-complaints/.