Debt Collection in America: 2026 Statistics

Begin with what mostly does not happen.

For the large majority of people with a collection account, there is no lawsuit. No garnished paycheck, no frozen bank account, no lien, no courtroom. The CFPB's national survey of consumer views on debt found that 32% of consumers with a credit record had been contacted by a creditor or collector in the prior year, and that 15% of those contacted reported being sued during that year. Run those two numbers together and you get Pew's summary of the same data: nearly 1 in 20 adults with a credit report said they had been sued by a creditor or collector in 2014. For the other 19, a year of collections meant letters, phone calls, a mark on a credit file, or nothing at all.

That is the base rate, and it is the part the statistics almost never lead with. The figures that circulate are the tail figures, because the tail is where the damage concentrates.

Here is why the tail still deserves the attention. When a debt case does reach a courtroom, it is not a contest. Pew's 2020 review of state civil dockets found that more than 70% of debt collection lawsuits end in a default judgment for the plaintiff, and that fewer than 10% of the people being sued have a lawyer, against nearly all of the companies suing them. A default judgment is entered without any finding that the debt is valid, that the amount is right, or that the correct person was sued. It carries the same enforcement power as a verdict after trial.

So the picture is a wide flat distribution with one very steep edge. This page collects the public numbers that describe both, with the source and the vintage attached to each one. Household balances and card APRs are a different subject, covered in the companion roundup of credit card debt statistics for 2026. This one picks up after default.

How many Americans have debt in collections?

About 22.7% of adults with a credit bureau record, at a median of $2,528 each.

That is the Urban Institute's Debt in America estimate, built from a 4% nationally representative panel of more than 10 million de-identified credit records pulled in August 2025 and published that November. Urban's definition is broad: it counts past-due credit lines that have been closed and charged off on the creditor's books as well as unpaid bills reported to a bureau that someone is trying to collect. So it captures both sides of the difference between a charge-off and a collection.

Roughly 2.7% of US adults have no credit record at all, so this is a share of people with a file, not of every adult.

The spread between states is wide enough that a national average tells you very little about your own.

• Under 17%
• 17–20%
• 20–25%
• 25–30%
• 30% and above

Urban Institute, Debt in America, August 2025 credit bureau data (published November 2025). All 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Louisiana sits highest at 33.1% and Minnesota lowest at 12.8%, a spread of more than two and a half to one. Urban also splits the national figure by neighborhood composition: 29.0% in ZIP codes where most residents are people of color, against 19.3% in majority-white ZIP codes. The credit files themselves carry no race data, so this is a geographic proxy, not a personal one.

A second national series counts something narrower and tells a different-looking story. The New York Fed's Household Debt and Credit report tracks the share of consumers with a third-party collection account on their credit report, and put it at 4.9% in the second quarter of 2026.

20132015201720192021202320252026

Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax, second-quarter reading each year through 2026 Q2.

That line looks like a decade of good news. Read it more carefully. Much of the fall is a change in what gets reported rather than a change in what gets collected, and the CFPB said so plainly in its February 2023 market snapshot, which found collections tradelines down 33% between early 2018 and early 2022. That decline, the agency wrote, "does not necessarily reflect a decline in debt collection activity, nor an improvement in families' abilities to meet their financial obligations, but a choice by debt collectors and others to report fewer collections tradelines while still conducting other collection activities." The later leg of the drop tracks the credit bureaus' voluntary removal of paid and low-balance medical collections in 2022 and 2023, covered further down.

Meanwhile the average balance moved the other way. Per person with a collection item, it rose from about $1,433 in early 2013 to $1,577 in mid-2026. Fewer accounts show up, and the ones that do are bigger. If a collection appears on your own file, the mechanics of how long collections stay on your credit report and how much a collection drops your credit score are the two clocks worth understanding first.

How big is the debt collection industry?

Roughly $20 billion in annual revenue, spread across more than 6,400 firms, with a workforce in the low six figures.

The most recent figure in a government report to Congress comes from the CFPB's Fair Debt Collection Practices Act annual report of September 2024, which described third-party debt collection as "a $20.2 billion industry that employs about 140,000 people across more than 6,400 collection agencies in the United States," citing IBISWorld market data from February 2024. The prior year's report put the same three numbers at $17.9 billion, 133,000 people and more than 6,300 agencies, and noted that the count of enterprises had fallen to 6,376 in 2022 as the industry consolidated.

An independent government count of the workforce comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which recorded 158,830 bill and account collectors nationally in its May 2025 occupational estimates, at a median annual wage of $47,030. That occupation code is broader than the agency industry, since it includes people doing first-party billing inside hospitals, utilities and card issuers.

Two business models sit inside that industry, and they behave differently enough that knowing which one is contacting you changes what to expect. A contingency-fee collector is paid a share of whatever it recovers, and the original creditor still owns the account. A debt buyer owns the account outright, having paid a fraction of the balance for it. The full mechanics are in the guide to who actually owns your debt.

Measure	Contingency-fee collectors	Debt buyers
How they get paid	A share of what they recover; the creditor keeps the account	They own the account, bought at a fraction of face value
Firms furnishing tradelines, Q1 2022	672, down from 815 in 2018	33, unchanged from 2018
Change in tradelines furnished, 2018 to 2022	38% fewer	9% more
Largest debt category furnished	Medical, 68.9%	Financial: cards and personal loans, 62.2%
Second largest	Telecommunications, 12.5%	Retail, 36.3%

• MeasureHow they get paid

  Contingency-fee collectors

  A share of what they recover; the creditor keeps the account

  Debt buyers

  They own the account, bought at a fraction of face value

• MeasureFirms furnishing tradelines, Q1 2022

  Contingency-fee collectors

  672, down from 815 in 2018

  Debt buyers

  33, unchanged from 2018

• MeasureChange in tradelines furnished, 2018 to 2022

  Contingency-fee collectors

  38% fewer

  Debt buyers

  9% more

• MeasureLargest debt category furnished

  Contingency-fee collectors

  Medical, 68.9%

  Debt buyers

  Financial: cards and personal loans, 62.2%

• MeasureSecond largest

  Contingency-fee collectors

  Telecommunications, 12.5%

  Debt buyers

  Retail, 36.3%

CFPB, Market Snapshot: An Update on Third-Party Debt Collections Tradelines Reporting, February 2023.

Two more numbers give the shape of the market. The median collections balance is $382, and almost three-quarters of all collections tradelines are non-financial: medical, utility, telecom, rental. This is not, in the main, an industry chasing large credit card balances. It is an industry chasing very small bills in enormous volume.

The CFPB has supervisory authority over nonbank collectors with more than $10 million in annual receipts from consumer debt collection, under a larger participant rule adopted in October 2012 and effective the following January. Everyone else is subject to the law, but not to routine examination.

Where does a defaulted account actually go?

Through a chain of owners, each paying less than the last. The same journey told from the consumer's side, month by month, is in the explainer on what happens when a debt goes to collections.

Original creditor

Internal recovery, then charge-off at around 180 days past due

Contingency agency

Works the account for a share of recoveries; the creditor still owns it

Debt buyer

Buys the portfolio outright and keeps everything it collects

Resale

Older, unworked accounts move to secondary buyers, sometimes repeatedly

Court

A small share are filed as debt claims, usually for under $5,000

Sequence per CFPB market monitoring and the FTC's debt buying study; charge-off timing per standard bank practice.

Not every account makes every stop. Card issuers surveyed for the CFPB's credit card market report placed about 18% of their post-charge-off inventory with third-party collectors in 2019 and 2020, with the rest sold, worked in-house, or left alone. Accounts that survive several rounds of this become the zombie debts that resurface years later under a name you have never heard of, which is exactly why the statute of limitations on debt is the first thing to check when an old balance reappears.

What does the debt buyer industry actually buy?

Data files, mostly. Not documents.

The definitive study is old and should be labelled as such. The FTC issued orders in December 2009 to nine of the largest debt buyers, which together had purchased 76.1% of all consumer debt sold in 2008, and published The Structure and Practices of the Debt Buying Industry in January 2013. The data covers portfolios bought between July 2006 and June 2009: more than 5,000 portfolios, nearly 90 million consumer accounts, $143 billion in face value, acquired for nearly $6.5 billion. Credit card debt made up 62% of the portfolios.

Average price: 4.0 cents per dollar of face value, with debt older than 15 years selling for virtually nothing. That pennies-on-the-dollar fact is the reason a collector has room to negotiate, and it is charted in the guide to what percentage to offer to settle a debt.

The findings that matter more, and get quoted less, concern what came with the money:

• For most portfolios, buyers received no account documents at all at the time of purchase. Only a small share of portfolios included statements or terms and conditions.
• Sellers generally disclaimed all representations and warranties about the accuracy of the account information, selling the debt essentially as is.
• Buyers rarely received dispute history, so they could not tell whether a consumer had already challenged the debt or whether it had been verified.
• Buyers often could not break the balance into principal, interest and fees, which is the itemization a consumer needs to check whether the number is right.
• Access to documents was rationed by contract: typically six months to three years to request free copies for 10% to 25% of the accounts, then $5 to $10 per document after that.

Then the dispute arithmetic. Consumers disputed 3.2% of the debts these buyers collected themselves, which the FTC scaled to roughly one million disputed debts a year industry-wide. Buyers reported verifying 51.3% of them, implying about 500,000 disputed debts a year that were never verified. That is the empirical case for sending a debt validation request rather than assuming the file is accurate.

For a current price signal, public filings are the honest substitute for a study that has not been repeated. PRA Group's 2025 annual report discloses portfolio purchases with a face value of $8.53 billion for a purchase price of $1.21 billion, a blended figure covering both its US and European buying, which price differently. Encore Capital Group, whose US collection arm is Midland Credit Management, reports a purchase price multiple of 2.3 on its 2025 United States vintage, meaning it expects to collect about $2.30 in total for every dollar it paid.

Scale, for context: Pew, drawing on Nilson Report data, put the face value of consumer debt sold to buyers at $6 billion in 1993 and $98 billion in 2013. Between 2008 and 2018, legal collections at Encore and Portfolio Recovery Associates grew 184% and 220% respectively. Felix has guides to the largest of these firms, including Midland Credit Management, Portfolio Recovery Associates, LVNV Funding and Jefferson Capital Systems.

How many debt collection lawsuits are filed each year?

The last reliable national count is about 4 million, and it is from 2013.

That is not a dodge. It is the honest state of the evidence, and it is itself one of the findings. Pew's How Debt Collectors Are Transforming the Business of State Courts used National Center for State Courts data, which broke civil filings down by case type in 1993 and again in 2013, the most recent year available at that level of detail. Over those twenty years debt claims rose from fewer than 1.7 million filings to about 4 million, and from an estimated 1 in 9 of 14.6 million state civil cases to about 1 in 4 of 16.9 million.

24%

of state civil court cases were debt collection claims in 2013

Up from under 12% in 1993. That year debt claims were the single most common type of civil case in state courts, ahead of landlord-tenant at 19% and mortgage foreclosure at 11%.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, May 2020, using National Center for State Courts data. Figures exclude small claims filings, which Pew notes almost certainly understates debt claims.

Total civil caseloads were falling the whole time, by more than 18% between 2009 and 2017. Debt claims took a bigger share of a shrinking pie. By 2013, suits brought by businesses against individuals accounted for 54% of civil dockets, and there were more of them (9.1 million) than family and juvenile cases combined (5.2 million and 1.4 million).

The state-level updates Pew could find all point the same way. In Texas, the only state reporting on all case types across all courts, debt claims more than doubled between 2014 and 2018 and reached 30% of the civil caseload, with the small claims justice courts up 140%. Over that five-year span, collectors filed one debt claim for every 19 adults in the state. Debt claims were the most common civil case in 9 of the 12 states that published any data at all.

Filings are also strikingly concentrated in a few plaintiffs. In Massachusetts, nine debt buyers accounted for 43% of civil and small claims caseloads in 2015. In Oregon, six debt buyers accounted for 25% of all civil cases from 2012 to 2016. In Pew's later study of Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, eight plaintiffs filed at least half of the successfully served debt collection cases in each city.

One more scale marker: Pew found that 75% of civil case judgments in 2013 were for less than $5,200, and that debt claims are almost always for less than $10,000. These are small cases in dollar terms and enormous cases in volume.

What is the default judgment rate in debt collection lawsuits?

More than 70%, in the jurisdictions that publish the number.

70%

or more of debt collection lawsuits end in a default judgment for the plaintiff

Entered because the defendant did not respond, with no finding on whether the debt is valid, whether the amount is correct, or whether the right person was sued.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, May 2020, summarizing studies across jurisdictions that report case dispositions over the prior decade.

Pew's phrasing is worth keeping intact: "over the past decade in the jurisdictions for which data are available, courts have resolved more than 70 percent of debt collection lawsuits with default judgments for the plaintiff." The individual studies behind it range widely. Four in five debt buyer cases filed in New York City between 2006 and 2008 ended in default. In five Colorado counties, 71% of debt buyer collection suits from 2013 to 2015 did. In Washington state's superior court, more than 80% did between 2012 and 2016.

Pew's later three-city study measured the same thing on a narrower slice: cases where the court's own records said the defendant had actually been served.

Court and period	Cases recorded as served	Share of filings served	Ended in default judgment
Cook County Circuit Court, 1st Municipal District (Chicago), 2013–2019	123,382	65%	53%
36th District Court (Detroit), 2014–2018	186,229	79%	69%
Philadelphia Municipal Court, 2013–2018	88,817	76%	59%

• Court and periodCook County Circuit Court, 1st Municipal District (Chicago), 2013–2019

  Cases recorded as served

  123,382

  Share of filings served

  65%

  Ended in default judgment

  53%

• Court and period36th District Court (Detroit), 2014–2018

  Cases recorded as served

  186,229

  Share of filings served

  79%

  Ended in default judgment

  69%

• Court and periodPhiladelphia Municipal Court, 2013–2018

  Cases recorded as served

  88,817

  Share of filings served

  76%

  Ended in default judgment

  59%

The Pew Charitable Trusts, How Debt Collection Works in Philadelphia's Municipal Court, October 2022. Default judgment shares are of cases the court recorded as successfully served.

Counted a different way, the Philadelphia figure is starker. Of the nearly 45,000 cases in Pew's study window that reached a judgment at all, excluding those settled or dismissed earlier, 95% ended in a default judgment. The median total judgment, including interest, court costs and fees, was $2,182.

Representation explains a great deal of this. Across studies from 2010 to 2019, fewer than 10% of debt claim defendants had a lawyer, ranging from 10% in Texas to essentially zero in New York City, while nearly all plaintiffs did. In Philadelphia over 2013 to 2018, 12% of defendants had counsel against 91% of plaintiffs. And representation changes outcomes: in Utah, a study of more than 165,000 debt cases disposed between 2015 and 2017 found 53% of represented defendants won their cases, against 19% of unrepresented ones.

The consumer-side view matches. In the CFPB survey, only 26% of people who said they had been sued reported attending the court hearing.

None of this is evenly distributed. In one New York City study, 95% of people with default debt judgments entered against them lived in low- or moderate-income neighborhoods, and more than half in predominantly African American or Latino communities. An analysis of judgments in St. Louis, Chicago and Newark found that even after accounting for income, the default judgment rate in mostly Black neighborhoods was nearly double the rate in mostly white ones.

Judgments also grow. All 50 states and the District of Columbia let courts award pre- and post-judgment interest, at rates Pew measured from 1.5% a year in New Jersey to 12% in Massachusetts where no contract rate governs. A Maryland study found that on top of an average principal of $2,811, courts added $512 in court costs, plaintiff attorney fees and interest, more than 18% on top. And in 44 states, a person who fails to appear at a post-judgment hearing can face a civil contempt arrest warrant.

What do CFPB debt collection complaints say?

That the most common grievance is not aggressive collection of a real debt. It is collection of a debt the consumer says is not theirs.

387,400

Debt collection complaints filed with the CFPB in 2025

The second most complained-about financial product, after credit and consumer reporting. Volume has grown from 109,900 in 2023 to 207,800 in 2024 to 387,400 in 2025.

CFPB Consumer Response Annual Report, March 2026, covering complaints received January to December 2025.

Some of that growth is real and some of it is the denominator. Total CFPB complaints across all products roughly doubled in each of the last two years, from 1,657,600 in 2023 to 3,187,900 in 2024 to 6,635,400 in 2025, with credit and consumer reporting alone accounting for 88% of the 2025 total. Debt collection is a smaller and slower-growing slice of a much larger pile.

Within debt collection, the CFPB reported that the monthly average for "attempts to collect debt not owed" rose 115% in 2025 against the prior two-year average, and that complaints about debts consumers did not recognize at all rose 240%. The agency attributed much of the increase to credit reporting: people finding collections they did not recognize on their reports, and asking for validation.

The subcategories are where the texture lives. These percentages are shares within each issue, from the CFPB's November 2025 report to Congress covering 2024 complaints.

Issue selected	Most common sub-issue	Next most common
Attempts to collect debt not owed	The debt is not mine, 60%	The debt resulted from identity theft, 28%
Written notification about debt	Notice did not disclose it was an attempt to collect a debt, 47%	Not enough information to verify the debt, 29%
False statements or representation	Collector tried to collect the wrong amount, 91%	Collector impersonated an attorney or government official, 5%
Threatening negative or legal action	Threatened to damage credit history, 59%	Threatened to sue on a debt that is old, 14%
Communication tactics	Frequent or repeated calls, 51%	Kept contacting after being told to stop, 34%
Sharing information improperly	Talked to a third party about the debt, 56%	Contacted the consumer's employer, 16%

• Issue selectedAttempts to collect debt not owed

  Most common sub-issue

  The debt is not mine, 60%

  Next most common

  The debt resulted from identity theft, 28%

• Issue selectedWritten notification about debt

  Most common sub-issue

  Notice did not disclose it was an attempt to collect a debt, 47%

  Next most common

  Not enough information to verify the debt, 29%

• Issue selectedFalse statements or representation

  Most common sub-issue

  Collector tried to collect the wrong amount, 91%

  Next most common

  Collector impersonated an attorney or government official, 5%

• Issue selectedThreatening negative or legal action

  Most common sub-issue

  Threatened to damage credit history, 59%

  Next most common

  Threatened to sue on a debt that is old, 14%

• Issue selectedCommunication tactics

  Most common sub-issue

  Frequent or repeated calls, 51%

  Next most common

  Kept contacting after being told to stop, 34%

• Issue selectedSharing information improperly

  Most common sub-issue

  Talked to a third party about the debt, 56%

  Next most common

  Contacted the consumer's employer, 16%

CFPB, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act Annual Report 2025 (November 2025), covering 2024 complaints. Percentages are shares within each issue category, not of all complaints.

Attempts to collect a debt not owed has been the single most-selected issue every year since the CFPB started taking debt collection complaints in 2013. Within that category, another ten percent of consumers said the debt had already been paid and three percent said it had been discharged in bankruptcy.

Outcomes are modest. Companies responded to 97% of the debt collection complaints sent to them in 2025, closing 66% with an explanation, 23% with non-monetary relief such as correcting a credit report entry or stopping calls, and 0.1% with money. In 84% of these complaints, the consumer had already tried to sort it out with the company directly.

The complaint file is a channel, not a census, so it measures what people report rather than what happens. It is still the best available window into collector conduct, and filing one is free. Felix has a walkthrough of how to report a debt collector, and the underlying conduct rules are in what collectors can and cannot do under the FDCPA and the 7-in-7 call frequency rule under Regulation F.

Enforcement volume is thin relative to complaint volume. The FTC's contribution to the CFPB's 2025 report to Congress described one new debt collection case filed in 2024, against a phantom debt operation the agency estimated had extracted more than $7.6 million from consumers, plus $540,000 in refunds mailed to 1,625 people harmed by two earlier phantom collection schemes.

How much of debt in collections is medical debt?

Far less on credit reports than three years ago. The bills themselves did not go anywhere.

This is the clearest example in the whole dataset of a statistic that moved because the rules changed rather than because the world did.

• March 2022. The CFPB estimated $88 billion in medical bills on consumer credit reports as of June 2021, and found medical debt made up 58% of all collection tradelines.
• March 2022 to April 2023. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion voluntarily stopped reporting paid medical collections, extended the wait before an unpaid one can appear from 180 days to a year, and then removed unpaid medical collections under $500.
• June 2023. The share of consumers with a medical collection on their credit record had fallen from about 14% to 5%, still leaving over 15 million people with one. Reported medical collections stood at about $49.2 billion. Average balances among those who still had one rose from around $2,000 to over $3,100, because the small ones came off and the large ones stayed.
• Q1 2023. Medical debt made up 36% of third-party collections tradelines, down from 57% a year earlier.
• July 11, 2025. The CFPB's rule that would have barred medical debt from credit reports outright was vacated by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Cornerstone Credit Union League v. CFPB. It never took effect. Anything you read that assumes it did is wrong, and the current position is set out in what the 2026 medical debt credit reporting rules actually say.

The underlying bills did not move much. KFF's analysis of Census survey data, published in March 2022 and describing 2019, estimated that about 9% of adults, roughly 23 million people, owed medical debt over $250, with 3 million owing more than $10,000, and put collective medical debt at a minimum of $195 billion. Urban's August 2025 credit data shows 3.2% of adults with a credit record carrying a reported medical collection at a median of $1,448, with seven states excluded because their own laws now restrict medical debt reporting.

Those two figures come from different years and different instruments, so the gap between them is illustrative rather than exact. The direction is not in doubt: a great deal of medical debt is being collected without appearing on anyone’s credit report. If a hospital bill is being collected from you, the practical steps are in what happens when medical bills go to collections.

How has debt collection regulation changed?

Slowly, in a handful of discrete steps, most of them within the last fifteen years.

1. Sept 1977

   The FDCPA is enacted

   Pub. L. 95-109 finds 'abundant evidence of the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices' and sets the ground rules that still govern third-party collectors.

2. 2009–2010

   The FTC studies the system and calls it broken

   Two reports conclude that collectors need better information, and that court complaints often lack enough detail for a consumer to answer them.

3. Oct 2012

   CFPB supervision arrives

   The larger participant rule, effective the following January, brings nonbank collectors with more than $10 million in annual receipts under routine federal examination for the first time.

4. Jan 2013

   The debt buying study

   The FTC publishes the only detailed look inside portfolio sales: 90 million accounts, sold as is, with almost no supporting documents.

5. Nov 30, 2021

   Regulation F takes effect

   Published at 85 FR 76734, it codifies call frequency limits, electronic communication rules, and a prohibition on suing or threatening suit on time-barred debt.

6. 2022–2023

   The bureaus change medical reporting

   Paid medical collections and unpaid ones under $500 come off credit reports voluntarily, cutting reported medical collections by more than half.

7. July 2025

   The medical debt rule is vacated

   A federal court strikes down the CFPB's rule barring medical debt from credit reports before it ever applies.

Statute text via Cornell LII; Regulation F via the Federal Register; remaining entries per FTC and CFPB publications cited above.

Regulation F is the most consequential recent change for day-to-day conduct, because it turned several vague standards into countable ones. Its call-frequency presumption is the reason the 7-in-7 rule exists, and its rules on contact are the practical basis for stopping collector calls without ignoring the debt and for the limits on contacting your workplace or your family.

How to read these numbers

Six things worth knowing before quoting any figure above.

"Share with debt in collections" means at least three different things. Urban's 22.7% counts charged-off accounts on the original creditor's books plus unpaid bills a creditor is trying to collect. The New York Fed's 4.9% counts third-party collection items on file within the last twelve months. The CFPB's own credit panel put "at least one collections tradeline" at nearly 1 in 5 people with a credit report as of early 2023. All three are correct. They answer different questions.

Credit-report counts measure reporting, not collecting. The CFPB has said plainly that the fall in collections tradelines reflects furnishers choosing to report less while still working the accounts. A collection that stops appearing on your file has not stopped existing.

The 70% default judgment figure is not a national census. It summarizes the jurisdictions that publish dispositions. Pew found that 38 states and the District of Columbia included no detail about debt cases in their annual reports, and that in 2018 only two states published default judgment figures for any debt cases at all. Texas is the only state that reports dispositions for debt claims across all courts.

The national court composition data is from 2013. That is the most recent year the National Center for State Courts broke civil filings down by case type at that level of detail. Everything since is state-by-state and patchy.

The FTC debt buying study describes portfolios bought before mid-2009. It remains the only study of its kind, and it has not been repeated. Treat its pricing as historical and its structural findings, about documentation and warranties, as the better-aging half.

Complaint counts are a channel, not a violation rate. They move with awareness, submission tooling and third-party filing services as well as with conduct. The CFPB itself attributed much of the 2025 surge to credit reporting behavior rather than to a change in collector practices.

Where a figure's best available vintage is old, this page says so in the sentence rather than in a footnote. A dated number honestly labelled is usable. A dated number implied to be current is not.

The practical reading of all this is narrower than the numbers suggest. Most collection accounts are small, poorly documented, owned by someone who paid very little for them, and never litigated. That combination is what creates room to negotiate, which is the subject of the guides to negotiating a settlement yourself and responding to a collection letter. The narrow, steep exception is court, and court runs on a deadline you either meet or you don't.

Where Felix fits

Felix negotiates with creditors and collectors on the accounts you enroll, on a flat subscription rather than a percentage of what you owe. That means correspondence, settlement offers, and a written record of what was agreed. You can see the current pricing before signing up.

Felix is not a law firm, does not appear in court, and cannot make a creditor accept anything. Nothing here is legal advice, and none of the figures above predict what will happen on your accounts. If you have been sued or already have a judgment against you, a lawyer or legal aid office is the right call and it is a genuinely different service from this one. The FAQ covers what the service does and does not do, and the privacy policy explains how your credit and account data are handled.