Research and reports

A new analysis in our Making Ends Meet survey series looks at how consumers use payday, auto title, and pawn loans.

This third COVID-19 Special Issue Brief describes the characteristics of mortgage borrowers, including demographics, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report focuses on borrowers with loans that are in forbearance or delinquent as reported through March 2021.

This report provides a foundational set of benchmarks of the financial well-being of Hispanics ages 18 and older in the United States in 2018, as measured by the CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale, that practitioners and researchers can use in their work.

This report summarizes some of the relevant data and research on the impact of the pandemic on the rental and mortgage market, and particularly its impact on low income and minority households. 11 million renter and homeowner households were significantly overdue on their regular housing payments as of December 2020, placing them at heightened risk of losing their homes to foreclosure or eviction over the coming months. Black and Hispanic households were more than twice as likely to report being behind on their payments than white households.

The Office of Research released a research brief summarizing the results of an online experiment exploring how the amount of available savings may influence decisions about using savings to pay down credit card debt.

The 2020 Financial Literacy Annual Report of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau details the Bureau’s financial literacy activities and strategy to improve the financial literacy of consumers. Overall, this report describes the Bureau’s efforts in a broad range of financial literacy areas relevant to consumers’ financial lives.

This report explores the prevalence of actual payment information in consumer credit reporting.

This report is a follow-on study to our Financially Fit research report. Rather than focus on the credit histories of young servicemembers, this study takes a closer look at the credit records of young veterans in the first year after separation from the military.

2020 Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB/BCFP) report on college credit card agreements.

Children’s Savings Account (CSA) programs provide children and families with long-term savings or investment accounts and incentives to save for postsecondary education.

This report describes the TRID Rule, the market, and the Bureau’s findings on the Rule’s effectiveness in meeting factors outlined in Dodd-Frank.

This Data Point provides new information about the types of changes that occur during the mortgage origination process.

The Office of Research released a research brief that explores consumers’ perceived financial preparedness, saving habits, and financial security.

This second COVID-19 Special Issue Brief describes trends in delinquency rates, payment assistance, credit access, and account balance measures with a focus on the period since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The goal of this article is to help the public become more familiar with the new and revised data points in the 2019 HMDA data and to provide some initial observations about the nation’s mortgage market in 2019 using those new and revised data points. As in last year’s article, the focus of this article is on cross-sectional analyses, i.e. using the data contained in one year’s loan application registrar (LAR) to explore various patterns and relationships between different data fields to provide some initial observations.

The Office of Research released a report that synthesizes the rigorous research of programs and strategies aiming to help consumers achieve greater liquid savings.

This report uses a representative sample of young servicemembers’ credit reports to show how their credit histories evolve from the time they turn 18 until their mid-twenties. It also compares servicemembers to a cohort of same-age civilians.

This report summarizes the initial results from the Making Ends Meet survey, a nationally representative survey of adults with a credit record developed by the CFPB’s Office of Research.

Quarterly consumer credit trends reports focus on a specific consumer financial product or issue using a longitudinal, nationally representative sample of de-identified credit records maintained by a nationwide consumer reporting agency.

2019 HMDA Mortgage Market Activity and Trends summarizes the historical data points in the 2019 HMDA data, as well as recent trends in mortgage and housing markets.

This report uses the Bureau’s Consumer Credit Panel to study the early effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on credit applications overall, by credit score group, and across the states.

This report is about the work of the CFPB’s Office of Servicemember Affairs for the period from October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019.

This report explores the prevalence and ease of first-time homeownership over time.

This Data Point article tracks the evolution of small business lending before, during and following the Great Recession.