How Debt Collection Index ranks debt collection agencies

By Kai Greenspan, Founding Editor · Last updated: August 5, 2026

What is the directory's scope?

This directory verifies agencies state by state, against each state's own public record. In Texas that is the surety bond record: every third-party collector must file a $10,000 bond with the Texas Secretary of State under Texas Finance Code Section 392.101 before collecting in the state. In New York City it is the Debt Collection Agency license issued by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, required of any agency collecting from city residents; New York listings appear as they pass the same verification. Many listed agencies operate nationally. A verified record in one state is one verifiable compliance fact; it is not a substitute for federal FDCPA compliance or for performance in other states. Always conduct your own due diligence.

Scope rule for debt purchasing: companies whose primary business is third-party collection are listed, with any debt-purchasing activity disclosed on their profile; companies primarily in the business of buying debt are not listed. The test is whether the business genuinely has two parts: a company that both buys and collects for other creditors is doing third-party collection and is listed; one bonded only to pursue debt it owns itself is not. The companies excluded under this rule are published, with their own words and the date read, on the debt buyers page, so the rule can be checked rather than taken on trust. The distinction rests on each company's own published descriptions and public records, and borderline calls are made case by case and recorded.

One standard, two instruments

A Texas surety bond is money on deposit: $10,000 a claimant can pursue if the collector breaks the law. A New York City license is permission to operate, with no money held. They are not the same guarantee, and this site never implies they are. What they share is the property the bands actually measure: each is a continuity-of-good-standing signal maintained, year after year, on a government register that anyone can check.

Three rules keep the comparison honest. The boundaries never bend per state: 25 / 15 / 5 years mean the same thing on every hub, so a band label is comparable across states. The label names the instrument: Texas bands read "continuously bonded" and New York bands read "continuously licensed", never interchangeably. Coverage is never merged across states: an agency bonded in Texas for a decade and licensed in New York for a year is shown as exactly that, two separate spans on two registers, never one combined number that no register asserts.

Added August 5, 2026, before the first New York agency was published, so the rule is on the record ahead of the data it governs.

What does Debt Collection Index measure?

How do the bands work?

This is the complete rule, exactly as the site applies it. Nothing else influences the bands, and any change to this rule is published here on the same day it takes effect.

Who is listed: only agencies that currently hold their state's required instrument in force: for Texas, a $10,000 surety bond on file with the Secretary of State; for New York City, an active Debt Collection Agency license with the DCWP. Each is independently checked against the live register. An agency whose coverage has ended keeps its published profile, showing the honest finding with its date, but appears in no band in that state.

How the bands are set: each agency's full filing history is read from the register, and its years of continuous coverage are measured, the unbroken span up to today. Overlapping or back-to-back bond filings count as continuous; a genuine lapse resets the clock. Agencies fall into a band by that number of years:

Within every band, agencies are listed alphabetically. No agency is ranked above another in its band, and the site asserts no ordinal position anywhere. Each agency's profile shows its exact years and its full bond-filing history, so any band placement can be checked against the register in minutes.

Revision note: the band boundaries were simplified to 25 / 15 / 5 on July 12, 2026. The original scheme (July 7, 2026) used boundaries of 28 / 20 / 10 / 3 and named its top band "A+ track record". The measure itself is unchanged: the same continuous-coverage rule, computed the same way from the same register; only the grouping boundaries and labels moved. Every revision to this rule is recorded here on the day it takes effect.

What the bands do not include

The bands rest on register-verified bond history alone. They do not include a complaint-handling score. We built and tested one against the full public CFPB complaint database (over 700,000 records, run twice to be certain), and the result was unambiguous: for the kind of agencies this directory lists, the measure cannot tell them apart, so publishing it would be false precision. CFPB complaint counts are still shown on each agency's profile and in the directory as context, never as a score and never affecting the bands. If a defensible, verifiable conduct measure emerges, it will be disclosed here in full before it appears anywhere on the site.

How are collection law firms handled?

Added July 14, 2026. Some debt collectors on the Texas register are law firms, not agencies. A law practice that regularly collects debts is a debt collector under the federal FDCPA (Heintz v. Jenkins, 1995) and files the same $10,000 surety bond, but calling a law firm a collection agency would be inaccurate, and a firm can sue in its own name, which readers deserve to know first. So collection law firms are a separate, clearly labeled category: they appear on the collection law firms page, banded by exactly the same continuous-bond-years rule and listed alphabetically within bands, and they are excluded from every agency list and band on this site. Their profiles carry a visible law-firm label. Listing criteria, verification and the never-for-sale rule are identical to agencies.

Where does the data come from?

Only public, checkable records. Each source is linked wherever its data appears.

Why our wording can differ from the register's

Texas publishes collection-bond records through two systems: an older register and a newer state portal. They use different words for the same bond states. So that every profile on this site reads the same way, bond statuses are translated into one vocabulary before they are published. If you check a bond at the source and see a different word from the one shown here, this table is why. This table applies to Texas bond records only; New York City license statuses are shown as the DCWP itself publishes them, with no translation.

Where a record carries a cancellation date, the date decides, not the word. A bond the portal marks Bond Cancelled may still be in force for weeks, and one it marks Filed may have ended years ago. We go by the date in both directions, and the date itself is shown on the agency's profile so you can check it yourself.

Revision note: this rule was published on July 30, 2026, before the first records from the newer portal are added, so the rule is on the record ahead of the data it governs. Every profile published to date was verified against the older register, where the wording already matches the left-hand column. No band or year count changed. The rule for counting continuous coverage is unchanged and is set out above.

When the state's newer portal does not return a bond

The two Texas systems do not hold identical records. The newer portal does not return every filing the older register recorded. As of August 17, 2026, 66 of the 528 bond filings behind agencies listed here are absent from the portal, affecting 52 firms.

Sixty-two of those are bonds that had already been cancelled, some of them in the 1990s. The state has stopped returning old closed filings, and nothing about those bonds has changed. The remaining four are bonds shown here as currently in force. Each of those four was checked against the original Secretary of State search on August 17, 2026 and confirmed active there, matching the status, bond number, surety and filing date shown on the profile.

That older search is frozen for new filings but remains live and public, and it is the source those profiles link to. So every bond shown here as in force can be checked at a state system today. Nothing is published as in force that neither system can confirm, and where the two systems disagree, the reading that understates the agency is the one used and the disagreement is recorded.

Added August 17, 2026. The figures come from the weekly re-check of every published bond and are restated when they change.

When an agency's bond ends, the page stays up

An agency whose bond has ended is not removed from this site. Its profile remains, banded nowhere, saying plainly that the bond ended and on what date. Deleting the page would be the easier choice and the less useful one: someone being contacted by that agency is better served by a dated, checkable fact than by silence, and a directory that quietly erases what it can no longer praise is not a record worth trusting.

Being listed here has never meant being endorsed. It means what is written has been checked against a public record, including when that record is unflattering. Agencies with no bond found under their name are published on the agencies page for the same reason.

There is a limit to what that sentence claims, and the limit is deliberate. We report the end of the bond coverage we can evidence, with its date, and nothing beyond it. We do not say the agency is unlicensed, that it is collecting unlawfully, or that it has stopped trading. A surety bond is money on deposit, not a permission to operate, and an agency may hold filings in other states, or filings we have not found. Where a bond ended and no later filing has been found, the profile says exactly that and stops.

Added August 3, 2026, after a weekly re-check of every published bond found one that had ended. The register's last word on it was recorded before the cancellation took effect, so it read pending cancellation indefinitely while the stated date passed unremarked. Profiles now give the date the coverage ended rather than repeating a word the calendar has overtaken. Where no cancellation date was recorded, no ending date is stated.

Are rankings ever for sale?

No. This is the rule the whole site is built around. Agencies can pay for clearly-labeled featured placement or for qualified buyer leads, and that revenue keeps the directory free for buyers. But paid placement is always marked as paid, sits apart from the merit rankings, and can never change where an agency ranks. If an agency ever appears above a better-performing rival, the methodology on this page is the only reason.

How does verification work?

Automated agents gather candidate facts from the public sources above, but nothing they gather is published directly. Every fact enters a review queue, where a person checks it against the original source before it is approved. Only records that pass that human review are marked verified and appear on the site, each carrying its source link and last-checked date. If a fact cannot be verified, it stays unpublished; a blank on this site means "not yet proven", never "probably fine". The gate is selective by design: as of the last rebuild, 316 companies have been screened against public records to publish 250 verified profiles.

Common questions about the method

Related pages