Seven specialty consumer reporting companies drew 52,819 CFPB complaints between October 2025 and September 2026, against 47,041 the year before. LexisNexis accounted for most of them: 34,987 complaints, up 116% from 16,208, well ahead of the 46.4% growth in all CFPB complaints and the 51.0% growth in credit reporting complaints. Early Warning Services went the other way, falling 70%. The complaints are unverified.
What specialty reports are
Equifax, Experian and TransUnion are not the only companies that keep files on consumers. Specialty consumer reporting companies collect narrower histories that other businesses check before they say yes: insurance claims and identity data (LexisNexis), closed or overdrawn bank accounts (ChexSystems, run by FNIS, and Early Warning Services), unpaid phone, cable and utility bills (NCTUE), employment and tenant background checks (Checkr and First Advantage), and alternative credit data (MicroBilt).
The Fair Credit Reporting Act covers them in the same way it covers the big three. You can ask each one for a free copy of your file every 12 months, dispute anything wrong, and expect a response, usually within 30 days. The CFPB keeps a list of these companies and how to contact them. Because a bad entry can lead to a denied checking account, a higher insurance quote or a lost job offer, people often first learn a file exists after being turned down.
Complaints by company
| Company | Complaints, Oct 2025-Sep 2026 | Oct 2024-Sep 2025 | Change | Vs. all complaints (+46.4%) | Top product | Top issue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LexisNexis | 34,987 | 16,208 | +115.9% | +69.5 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
| FNIS (ChexSystems) | 7,673 | 5,549 | +38.3% | -8.1 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
| Early Warning Services | 6,891 | 23,340 | -70.5% | -116.8 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
| NCTUE | 1,308 | 457 | +186.2% | +139.9 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Problem with fraud alerts or security freezes |
| Checkr | 780 | 406 | +92.1% | +45.8 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
| MicroBilt | 676 | 796 | -15.1% | -61.4 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
| First Advantage | 504 | 285 | +76.8% | +30.5 pts | Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports | Incorrect information on your report |
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 changed
Most complaints about these companies fall under credit reporting, and the leading issue for almost all of them is incorrect information on a report. Two companies stand out from that pattern.
Early Warning Services also runs the Zelle payment network, so it draws complaints about payments as well as reports. Its money-transfer complaints fell from 18,807 to 1,574, which explains the whole drop; its credit-reporting complaints rose from 3,693 to 4,589. FNIS is a large payments and banking technology company, so a small part of its count (687 complaints) is about bank accounts rather than ChexSystems reports.
NCTUE complaints nearly tripled, from 457 to 1,308, and most were about fraud alerts or security freezes rather than errors. Besides Early Warning, MicroBilt was the only company here with fewer complaints than a year earlier, down from 796 to 676.
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. 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, "Specialty Consumer Report Complaints by Company," My Credit Guide, October 23, 2026, https://mycreditguide.org/data/specialty-consumer-report-complaints/.