The Debt Collection Lab produces original research papers and briefs studying the impact of debt collection lawsuits on consumers and the courts.

Ann Baddour, M.A., M.P.Aff. | Director, Fair Financial Services Project and Texas Appleseed • August 17, 2026

How Turnover Receivers Are Used in Harris County Debt CasesDownload PDF

In Texas, once a plaintiff receives a judgment, they have access to a range of post-judgment enforcement tools designed to help them collect what they are owed. One of the most powerful — and least studied — are turnover receiverships. A court appoints a third party (a receiver) who is tasked with locating, taking control of, and liquidating the judgment debtor's non-exempt property to satisfy a judgment. We examined how often turnover receivers are requested, which courts rule on these cases, who requests them, and how they affect the amount people ultimately pay to resolve a debt.

Over the past several years, nearly every external check on student loan contractors has been weakened. The CFPB's supervision of student loan servicers, once the leading federal oversight in the space, has been functionally paused. The FSA Ombudsman's capacity to intake and resolve borrower complaints has been gutted. ED's own Inspector General's reach has narrowed, and FSA's staff has been cut by almost half. The operational consequence is palpable: in February 2025, FSA stopped assessing servicers on accuracy and call quality, citing a lack of staff capacity. Even before it stopped looking, four of the five servicers were failing its accuracy standards. When GAO recommended that ED resume the assessments, the agency declined.

Bonnie Latreille and Chris Hicks • June 11, 2026

Repeat Offenders: The Student Loan Servicers Who Keep Getting Paid to Fail BorrowersDownload PDF

As more and more households struggle to keep up with rising costs, an unprecedented wave of student loan defaults is hitting more than ten million American households as they rapidly fall behind on their student loan payments, with a borrower defaulting every 9 seconds in 2025.

David McClendon and Divia Kallattil • December 17, 2025

Consumer Debt Collection Lawsuits in Wisconsin, 2018-2024Download PDF

Consumer debt collection lawsuits are among the most common cases in Wisconsin civil courts and appear to be on the rise in recent years, with nearly 100,000 cases filed in 2024 alone. These lawsuits involve unpaid credit card bills, medical debt, personal loans, utility bills, and other consumer debts, with a median judgment around $2,700 in Wisconsin.

While the current government shutdown has delayed data releases, data are expected to show this wave of new defaults stacking atop the five million borrowers already in default, bringing the student debt crisis to an unprecedented level of distress. In total, roughly one-quarter of all federal student loan borrowers will face the fallout of defaulted loans, and if current delinquency trends hold, as many as 13 million borrowers may end up in default by the end of 2026.

Jay Speer and Joanna Darcus • August 27, 2025

Analyses of Virginia debt collection lawsuit court data, 2019-2024Download PDF

The Virginia Poverty Law Center, with assistance from The Pew Charitable Trusts, accessed bulk general district court data to analyze consumer debt cases by identifying top filers, case outcomes, and post-judgment enforcement practices. The analyses show how the volume of debt collection lawsuits filed and subsequent post-judgment collection activity through the courts can devastate the household finances, including a disproportionate share of people in Black and Latino communities.

Barak Richman, Julie Havlak, Margaret Nikolov, Sujin Song, Ilaria Santangelo, Onisuru Ojegba, Kyle Donohue, Tanner Whitsell, Calvin Haensel, Arnold Milstein, and Cynthia A. Fisher • August 05, 2025

Hospitals Suing Patients: The Rise of Stealth IntermediariesDownload PDF

Starting in 2020, the University of Colorado Health system (UCHealth), the state's largest nonprofit hospital system, began relying heavily on third-party debt collectors to engineer lawsuits against its own patients. Though UCHealth had consistently brought lawsuits against patients through 2019, UCHealth sharply decreased its own debt collection actions against its patients the following year. At the same time, total debt collection actions brought by CollectionCenter Inc (CCI), a collection agency owned by a revenue cycle management company, more than doubled. A sample of court records indicates that the majority of CCI's actions were brought on behalf of UCHealth.

Jeff Reichman • April 02, 2025

Enriching Court Data to Identify Households in Consumer Debt and Eviction LawsuitsDownload PDF

In 2023, there were over 141,000 debt claim and eviction lawsuits filed in Harris County, Texas. These staggering numbers underscore a growing crisis in consumer debt and housing instability, but they only tell part of the story.

Frederick F. Wherry and Hannah Hill • October 08, 2024

How State Policies Affect Court Judgments in Debt Collection Lawsuits: a Comparative Study Across Four StatesDownload PDF

When defendants engage with civil courts about debt collection lawsuits across the United States, they encounter courts that are governed by different policy environments. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative evidence, this study uses a comparative design to investigate whether a debtor sued in a policy environment with fewer consumer protections is more likely to receive a default judgment as a case outcome than those sued in a policy environment with more consumer protections.

Abhay Aneja, Luis Faundez, Dalié Jiménez, Claire Johnson Raba, Prasad Krishnamurthy, and Manisha Padi • September 10, 2024

Debt Documentation Requirements in State Courts and Access to CreditDownload PDF

In this fourth paper on the effect of debt documentation requirements, the authors estimate the effect of these laws on credit access using a difference-in-differences approach. They designatestates that passed documentation reforms as treated states and those that did not as controls. They then compare the difference in credit access between treated and control states before and after the documentation reforms. They find no evidence that enhanced debt documentation requirements lead to lower credit access. In particular, they find no statistical evidence of a decline in the number of open credit cards, credit card access, or total credit card debt after the passage of enhanced documentation requirements.