Fair Lending Report of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for 2025
In 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) transformed its fair lending program by refocusing its regulatory, supervisory, and enforcement activities on its statutory authority and identified consumer harm. Under previous administrations, the CFPB was weaponized and had gone beyond its statutory mandate. In the area of fair lending specifically, CFPB leadership uncovered egregious examples of companies being targeted for protected political speech and exercising their constitutional rights. Throughout the reporting period, the CFPB worked to correct its course and reverse the previous administrations’ abuses and overreach of its statutory mandates.
Under President Trump, the CFPB shifted the way it regulates, supervises, and enforces the laws as required under the Dodd-Frank Act. The CFPB’s fair lending efforts now focus on proven, intentional racial discrimination with actual identifiable victims. The CFPB does not engage in or facilitate unconstitutional racial classification or discrimination in its enforcement of fair lending laws. The Bureau employs its resources on pressing threats to consumers and in the areas that are clearly within the CFPB’s statutory authority, without duplicating work of other regulators. Enforcement also is being guided by a new set of principles so that the CFPB focuses on addressing actual harm to consumers, ensuring due process, seeking collaboration when appropriate, and promoting efficiency.
To guide its fair lending efforts, CFPB leadership prioritized implementation of several executive orders, including directives prohibiting unlawful debanking, terminating all discriminatory and illegal preferences, and ending use of disparate impact liability in the enforcement of civil rights laws. Accordingly, during the reporting period, the CFPB stopped using disparate impact in its supervision and enforcement of fair lending laws and undid previous actions relying on disparate impact. The CFPB also stopped consulting with institutions regarding special purpose credit programs (SPCPs) based on race, color, national origin, or sex and prioritized addressing unlawful debanking.
In support of the President’s deregulatory agenda, the CFPB worked diligently to reverse regulatory overreach, reduce unjustified regulatory burdens, and streamline and clarify existing regulations. In 2025, the CFPB prioritized two rulemakings related to fair lending. Both rules were finalized in 2026. The first rulemaking amended Regulation B, subpart A, implementing the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) to affirm that ECOA does not authorize disparate impact liability. The rule also prohibits use of race, color, national origin, or sex as eligibility criteria for SPCPs and clarifies the discouragement provisions, protecting targeted advertising from discouragement claims under ECOA. We made these important regulatory changes to align with the best reading of the law and to minimize risks of impermissible and unconstitutional discrimination. Importantly, the changes help ensure that credit is made available to all without regard to protected class status.
The second rulemaking amended Regulation B, subpart B, implementing section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act. It amended the scope of what constitutes a covered financial institution and covered credit transaction, modified the gross annual revenue threshold in the rule’s definition of small business from $5 million or less to $1 million or less, removed certain data points not required by the statute, and altered certain requirements related to how data is collected. The 2023 rule had imposed a significant number of requirements that are unnecessary to advance the purposes of section 1071, and the CFPB now asks for only what the statute requires. These updates both reduce unnecessary compliance burdens and result in a substantial cost savings for impacted institutions, including a one-time savings of nearly $100M and an annual ongoing savings between $166M and $181M per year.
As this report reflects, we have made great progress implementing the President’s agenda in 2025, and we are very proud of our fair lending accomplishments. These are only a few examples of the CFPB’s fair lending work in 2025, as described in this report. Although the reporting period for this report is calendar year 2025, we have also included some activity that took place outside of the reporting period due to its importance and relevance to the covered topics.
Full Report
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