2 Federal Fair Lending and Credit Practices Manual § 14.01

Summary

• [1] Today’s Debt Collection Industry

  The debt collection industry affects millions of Americans. According to the latest available estimates, the third-party debt collection market is a $20.2 billion industry that employs about 140,000 people across more than 6,400 collection agencies in the United States. Nearly one in five people with a credit report had at least one collections tradeline on their credit report as of Q1 2023, according to the CFPB’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a national 1-in-48 sample of de-identified credit records maintained by one of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. The most common debt collection tradeline is medical debt, making up 36 percent of third-party collections tradelines. This is a decrease from 2022, when 57 percent of these tradelines were associated with medical debt. This decline is likely related to the April 2023 credit reporting change, in which the three nationwide consumer reporting companies (Equifax, Experian, and ...