Where Auto-Loan Borrowers Complain Most: CFPB Vehicle-Loan Complaints by State (and the Repossession Share)

Key facts

• 52,911 CFPB vehicle-loan/lease complaints in the window; latest complaint in the pull is dated 2026-10-03, two days before retrieval.
• "Vehicle loan or lease" is the CFPB product label; it covers loans and leases on both new and used vehicles, not used cars only.
• Per-resident top five: Georgia 34.76, DC 30.76, Delaware 27.00, Florida 26.87, Maryland 24.09 (per 100,000 residents).
• Per-registered-vehicle top five (the reversal check): Delaware 63.79, DC 62.77, Georgia 42.27, Florida 32.17, Maryland 30.58. The same five jurisdictions, reordered - Georgia leads on residents, Delaware on vehicles.
• Repossession is the #2 issue nationally: 13,917 of 52,911 (26.3%), behind "Managing the loan or lease" (15,420; 29.1%).
• Deep-South states run highest on repossession share: Mississippi 32.2%, Alabama 31.8%, Louisiana 31.2%, Carolinas 30.2%.
• California files the 2nd-most complaints in raw numbers (5,577) but ranks #20 per capita — the big-state illusion the per-capita cut removes.
• News context: California's SB 766 (CARS Act) takes effect October 1, 2026; Tricolor Holdings filed Chapter 7 on Sept 10, 2025.

Which state's auto-loan borrowers complain the most per capita?

Georgia. Across 52,911 CFPB vehicle-loan/lease complaints, Georgia logged 34.76 per 100,000 residents — the highest of all 50 states and DC, and 13% above second-place Washington, DC (30.76). Delaware (27.00), Florida (26.87) and Maryland (24.09) complete the top five. Georgia's lead is clear on this denominator; it is 3rd, behind Delaware and DC, when the same complaints are divided by registered vehicles instead. The five jurisdictions at the top are the same under both cuts, so the set is robust and the order within it is not - stated here rather than only in the method, because "Georgia is #1" is the sentence that travels.

The ranking is a map of where borrowers complain to a federal regulator, not a direct measure of lending abuse. Complaint propensity is shaped by consumer awareness, financial sophistication and the presence of local legal-aid networks. Georgia's rank may partly reflect a more complaint-active population, not only worse lending conditions. This is the same per-capita shape behind our earlier look at vehicle complaints by state, where normalizing by population also reshuffled the obvious suspects.

Full 50-state + DC table, all three normalizations, in the frozen CSV linked under Sources.

Why does California rank #2 in raw complaints but #20 per capita?

Because raw counts just track population. California files 5,577 complaints — second only to Florida's 6,280 — but it has 39.4 million residents, so its rate is 14.14 per 100,000, placing it 20th of 51. New York is #5 in raw volume and #25 per capita (12.87); Texas is #3 raw and #12 per capita. Georgia rises the other way, from #4 in raw counts to #1 per capita. The per-capita cut flips the big-state story that absolute totals tell.

We ran a second normalization as a reversal check — complaints per 100,000 registered vehicles, using FHWA Highway Statistics MV-1 (2023) — because a state with few cars per resident can look different per vehicle. The top tier held: Delaware (63.79), DC (62.77), Georgia (42.27), Florida (32.17) and Maryland (30.58) stay at the top under both resident and vehicle normalizations, so the finding survives the test. The biggest mover is New York, which jumps from #25 per capita to #8 per vehicle — it has unusually low car ownership per resident. California stays mid-pack (#20 per capita / #16 per vehicle), confirming it is not a "worst state" despite leading raw counts. No most-or-worst superlative holds without naming which normalization you mean and that all 51 jurisdictions were tested.

How large is the repossession share, and where is it concentrated?

Repossession is the second most common issue in the data: 13,917 of 52,911 complaints (26.3%) carry the CFPB issue label "Repossession," behind only "Managing the loan or lease" (29.1%). This is a count of complaints that mention repossession — a measure of what people complain about, not a repossession rate, and it cannot be converted into one.

The six highest repossession shares all sit in the South. Among states with at least 200 complaints, Mississippi leads at 32.2%, followed by Alabama (31.8%), Louisiana (31.2%), North Carolina and South Carolina (both 30.2%) and Florida (30.0%) — all well above the national 26.3%. California (22.6%) and New York (22.5%) sit below it.

Two qualifications keep this from being a clean regional story, and both are in the frozen CSV. Pennsylvania is 7th at 28.8% (n=1,863), ahead of Texas and Georgia, so the top of the list is not exclusively Southern. And four Southern states sit below the national share: Oklahoma 24.7%, Arkansas 24.6%, Virginia 24.3% and Kentucky 24.0%. The pattern is a Deep South plus Carolinas and Florida cluster, not "the South".

All twelve CFPB issue labels present in the window are accounted for above; the seven named rows plus the combined remainder sum to 52,911.

Method: how we counted this, and how to verify it yourself

Source file and date. CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, public search API v1, retrieved 2026-10-05. The database is CC0, so the pull below reproduces exactly. Before computing anything we asserted the newest record in the pull: max(date_received) = 2026-10-03, two days before retrieval — the check that catches a dataset silently serving stale records under a fresh timestamp.

Universe and exact filter. · product = "Vehicle loan or lease", date_received from 2024-01-01 to 2026-10-05. N = 52,911 complaints. This label covers loans and leases on both new and used vehicles; the database carries no new/used flag, so no used-only figure can be derived from it.

Cleanup and the one exclusion. Counts are by the complainant's self-reported state field. 70 of the 52,911 records carry a blank state, so the per-state buckets sum to 52,841 and those 70 are excluded from every per-state figure but retained in all national figures. Six non-state jurisdictions in the raw buckets (Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Minor Outlying Islands and the AE/AP military codes) are excluded from the ranking, which covers the 50 states plus DC — 51 jurisdictions, so every rank in this article is out of 51.

Aggregation. Complaints per state ÷ US Census Vintage-2024 state population × 100,000 for the per-resident rate; complaints per state ÷ FHWA Highway Statistics MV-1 (2023) all-motor-vehicle registrations × 100,000 for the per-vehicle rate. Repossession figures count the CFPB issue label "Repossession" nationally and within each state; a state's repossession share is its repossession count ÷ its own total.

The reversal check, and its result. The check most likely to break a per-capita ranking is the denominator, so we re-ranked all 51 jurisdictions per registered vehicle. The ranking as a whole survives — Spearman rank correlation 0.97 — but its top does not. Georgia is 1st per resident and 3rd per vehicle, behind Delaware (63.79) and DC (62.77); New York moves from 25th to 8th on unusually low car ownership per resident. The five jurisdictions at the top are the same set under both cuts, so the finding we publish is "these five lead", not "Georgia is worst". Both cuts are in the CSV so a reader can redo or reject either.

Known limits, stated plainly. (1) A complaint count measures propensity to complain to a federal regulator, which varies with awareness, financial sophistication and legal-aid presence — it is not a repossession rate and cannot be converted into one. (2) DC (n=216) and Delaware (n=284) lead the per-vehicle cut on three-figure counts, so their rates are noisier than Georgia's (n=3,887) or Florida's (n=6,280); the count sits beside every rate for that reason. (3) The CFPB database refreshes daily, so a later re-pull returns slightly different counts — the frozen CSV is the version these numbers come from. (4) Neither denominator is the ideal one, which would be auto-loan accounts per state; that is not published free at state level for this window.

Why this is in the news: the California law and the subprime collapse

Two events put dealer and auto-financing conduct in the headlines as this ranking published. First, California's SB 766, the Combating Auto Retail Scams (CARS) Act authored by Sen. Ben Allen and signed by Gov. Newsom in October 2025, takes effect October 1, 2026. It requires out-the-door "total price" disclosure in advertising, bans junk add-on fees with no benefit to the buyer, and creates a first-in-the-nation 3-day return right for used cars priced at or under $50,000 (restocking fee 1.5% of the sale price, not less than $200 and not more than $600, plus $1 per mile over 250 miles capped at $150). Those dollar figures are read from the enrolled bill text, not from the Senate press release, which does not carry them. It mirrors the federal FTC CARS Rule; the state projects roughly $234 million a year in consumer savings — a legislative estimate, not an audited figure. It is distinct from a separate dealer-backed documentation-fee-hike bill Newsom vetoed the same month.

Second, subprime lender Tricolor Holdings — a Dallas used-car financier serving mostly borrowers without SSNs or credit files — filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy on September 10, 2025, with roughly $2 billion in debt and 25,000-plus creditors, amid a federal fraud probe into collateral allegedly pledged to multiple lenders. That collapse sits atop a broader repossession surge: Cox Automotive counted 1.73 million vehicles repossessed in 2024, the most since 2009, with the auto-loan default rate at 3.13%, the highest since 2011; Fitch Ratings put subprime auto 60-plus-day delinquencies at 6.43% in August 2025, the highest in more than 30 years of tracking. If you are shopping the former-subprime or repossessed inventory now hitting the market, our guides to what happens to your car loan when the dealer goes bankrupt and what to check before buying a buy here pay here car cover the paperwork and the car itself.

What a VIN check can and can't tell you here

A VIN check and this complaint study answer different questions. This CFPB analysis is a research-desk map of where borrowers complain about financing. A VIN check vets the car itself — and it cannot see any loan, lease, financing, delinquency, repossession or CFPB-complaint record tied to a VIN. Those are borrower and lender financial data, not vehicle-history data, and they are in no VIN feed. If you are buying through a subprime-heavy or repossession channel, the practical move is to vet a buy-here-pay-here car before financing and inspect the vehicle's history.

A Zilocar VIN check screens for recall presence (like NHTSA's free tool) and surfaces accident and airbag-deployment history, salvage and junk-auction records, odometer rollbacks, theft, ownership and sales-listing history, specs, NHTSA/IIHS ratings and valuation. It does not confirm a recall was remedied, track NHTSA investigations, or show a car's legal title brand or financing — confirm remedy status with NHTSA or a dealer.

Related checks

• What happens to your car loan when the dealer goes bankrupt
• What to check before buying a buy here pay here car
• Vehicle complaints by state

Sources

• CFPB Consumer Complaint Database — search API v1 (product=Vehicle loan or lease) — the dataset itself (CC0).
• CFPB Consumer Complaint Database — landing and field definitions
• US Census Bureau — Vintage 2024 state population estimates (NST-EST2024-ALLDATA.csv) — per-capita denominator.
• FHWA Highway Statistics Table MV-1 (2023) — per-registered-vehicle reversal check.
• California Senate (Sen. Ben Allen) — SB 766 CARS Act provisions and timeline — signed October 7, 2025; the $234 million annual savings estimate.
• California Legislature — SB 766 enrolled bill text — the $50,000 eligibility cap, the three-day cancellation right, the 1.5% / $200 / $600 restocking fee and the October 1, 2026 operative date, verified in the statute rather than in coverage of it.
• CalMatters — Newsom vetoes separate dealer fee-hike bill
• Bloomberg Law — Tricolor subprime auto lender Chapter 7
• Newsweek — 2024 repossessions 1.73M (Cox Automotive)
• Frozen CFPB pull — CSV (all 51 jurisdictions, three normalizations)

Last verified: 2026-10-05.