WASHINGTON — Consumer complaints about mortgage servicers have surged this year as more homeowners struggle to make payments, even as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has sharply reduced its oversight of the industry, according to new reporting.
CFPB data cited by Fortune show mortgage complaints industrywide rose 49% during the first nine months of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. At Onity, the West Palm Beach, Fla.-based parent of PHH Mortgage, complaints increased 51% to 1,208.
Onity, which has annual revenue of about $1.1 billion, ranks among the 10 largest nonbank mortgage servicers, with more than one-million customers and a $340 billion servicing portfolio. Nearly half its mortgage complaints involved borrowers having trouble making payments, compared with about 30% among its major competitors, Fortune reported. The company also has a history of regulatory enforcement actions.
“Onity has undergone significant transformation over the years, including meaningful enhancements to our operations, technology and systems, and customer service capabilities,” Dico Akseraylian, an Onity senior vice president of communications, told Fortune.
Akseraylian said Onity works with nonprofit housing counselors and borrowers facing payment difficulties. He said the company has helped approximately 1.6 million U.S. homeowners avoid foreclosure and forgiven more than $19 billion in mortgage debt.
Financial Pressures Mount
The increase in complaints comes as active foreclosures have reached 296,000, the highest level in seven years, according to Intercontinental Exchange data cited by Fortune. Inflation, a weak job market and mortgage rates recently reaching 7.4% have made it harder for homeowners to stay current or refinance.
Changes over the past 18 months to assistance programs for mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs have also complicated efforts by distressed borrowers to obtain relief, Fortune reported.
Oversight and Enforcement Decline
At the same time, the CFPB has reduced supervisory examinations, which historically helped identify servicing problems before they became widespread. Before 2025, the agency conducted about 150 examinations of financial institutions annually, including dozens involving mortgage servicers, a former CFPB employee told Fortune.
The agency conducted no supervisory examinations during at least the first eight months of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to the report. Examinations reportedly resumed in 2026, with 70 scheduled for the year, but Fortune said it found no evidence that mortgage servicers were among those being examined. CFPB representatives did not respond to its requests for comment.
Nonbank companies, including Onity, Rocket Mortgage and Pennymac, now service more than half of U.S. residential mortgages, up from 7% about 15 years ago, according to Fortune. The report described a sector facing substantially less federal scrutiny as its share of the roughly $15 trillion mortgage servicing market has grown.
Borrowers Have Limited Leverage
Housing counselors and attorneys told Fortune that the reduced threat of CFPB action has made it harder to resolve borrowers’ problems.
“The attitude really flip-flopped once they knew no one was watching,” Thomas Griffin, a counselor with the Southern California-based USA Homeownership Foundation, told Fortune.
Marc Dann, a former Ohio attorney general whose law firm represents borrowers, said mortgage servicers increasingly fail to follow the CFPB’s notice-of-error process, which allows borrowers to report servicing mistakes in writing and generally requires a response within 30 days.
“Without the examinations, without the risk of big cases by the CFPB, then all the servicers have to worry about is occasionally paying off one of our clients, which is probably cheaper than complying,” Dann told Fortune.
Borrowers also generally cannot choose which company services their loans. Oregon attorney Hope Del Carlo, who has represented borrowers for 26 years, told Fortune that lenders’ control over that decision creates an incentive to select the lowest-cost servicer rather than the one offering the best customer service.
