The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently released its Semi-Annual Report to Congress covering its activities from January to June 2026. The report describes the CFPB’s continued emphasis on deregulation, violations involving measurable consumer harm, voluntary remediation, and a shift away from reliance on novel legal theories and duplicative federal and state oversight. It highlights the CFPB’s significantly pared-down enforcement and supervisory activities while noting its narrower interpretation of fair lending liability and heightened focus on combating unlawful debanking.
Although the report generally covers January through June 2026, it discusses more recent developments, as well as certain enforcement, supervision, consumer complaints statistics and significant rulemakings from July 2025 through June 2026.
Enforcement and supervisory efforts
Between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, the CFPB’s supervisory and enforcement priorities reflected those listed in an April 2025 memo, including providing redress to servicemembers and veterans and identifying and remediating violations related to credit reporting, consumer and mortgage lending, fraudulent charges and data privacy.
Enforcement
The CFPB announced updated enforcement principles in May 2026 that focus on actual consumer harm, due process, voluntary remediation and avoiding duplicative enforcement. Consistent with these principles, between July 2025 and June 2026, the CFPB closed approximately 40% of its pending investigations following a review against these revised priorities. The CFPB also terminated 16 pending final orders, finding that the orders’ remaining administrative obligations imposed unwarranted costs and oversight. In all but one of those cases, the financial institutions had already paid the required redress and civil penalties, where applicable. During this same period, the CFPB reports initiating one public enforcement action, resolving nine actions (including the one newly initiated action) and “dismissing or withdrawing as plaintiff” from one action.
Supervision
During the reporting period, the CFPB closed 1,327 of the 1,552 supervisory actions open on July 1, 2025 (about 86%), after determining that institutions had addressed the issues or the findings no longer aligned with the CFPB’s updated priorities. It also closed 66 of 80 open examinations following a priorities review. In the 14 that remained, examiners sought commitments to correct violations and remediate affected consumers.
In addition to centralizing its supervision division by eliminating its regional structure, the CFPB reduced scheduled examinations by approximately 50% and focused supervision on depository institutions. It instituted a new Humility in Supervision Pledge that calls for advance notice, defined examination scopes, tailored information requests and greater use of supervisory resolution where feasible.
Fair lending efforts
As we previously described, the CFPB has focused its fair lending supervision on matters with “direct evidence of intentional discrimination” involving identified victims.
The CFPB indicated that it had not identified any fair lending violations and did not make any pattern-or-practice lending discrimination referrals to the Department of Justice during the reporting period. It nevertheless continued fair lending investigations.
The report details the CFPB’s efforts to combat unlawful debanking – including reviewing supervisory records, complaints and public information to identify possible unlawful debanking by financial institutions and removing references to reputation risk in materials used to regulate or examine institutions. It is also evaluating institutions’ compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) and Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) adverse action notices, potential unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAP), and evidence of intentional religious discrimination. The report also describes the CFPB’s Regulation B final rule, effective July 21, 2026, which states that ECOA does not authorize disparate-impact liability and added new prohibitions and conditions for special purpose credit programs.
Other rulemakings
In addition to amending Regulation B, the CFPB finalized a rule that revised Section 1071 small-business lending data collection requirements and jointly published a final rule with other financial regulators that established data standards to promote interoperability of financial regulatory data across agencies.
Changes to consumer complaints
The CFPB notes that, between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, it received approximately 8,268,100 complaints and sent approximately 7,501,400 of those complaints to companies for review. Companies responded to approximately 99.6% of complaints transmitted for response.
The report highlights the changes implemented by the CFPB to its complaint portal, including a new credit-reporting complaint notice. The notice, which applies to credit report-related disputes only, requires consumers to attest before submitting their complaint with the CFPB that they submitted a dispute to the consumer reporting agency, and that either 45 days had elapsed or the dispute was no longer pending. Other changes include instituting two-factor authentication for users who create online accounts, clearer third-party submission requirements, clarifying complaint closure categories and launching an API pilot for companies responding to complaints. The CFPB also ended publication of complaint narratives, in a notable departure from its past practice.
Looking ahead
The report identifies the CFPB’s current regulatory priorities as reconsidering the Personal Financial Data Rights Rule, often referred to as the open banking rule, and pursuing rulemakings to promote access to mortgage credit. To that end, the CFPB reports that it is working on a proposed rulemaking to amend the open banking final rule, published in October 2024. It is also evaluating potential changes to Regulation Z’s ability-to-pay requirements and qualified mortgage definitions. Separately, it is considering a final rule to streamline Regulation X’s loss mitigation review process for borrowers experiencing payment difficulties. The CFPB also is working on a proposed rule to reconsider the remaining provisions of its 2017 Payday, Vehicle Title, and Certain High-Cost Installment Loans rule and expects to continue working on other rulemakings.