How Debt Collection Index ranks debt collection agencies

By Kai Greenspan, Founding Editor · Last updated: September 23, 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, five 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. A Florida registration is a filing with the Office of Financial Regulation, renewed every year. A California license is permission from the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the Debt Collection Licensing Act, backed by a bond the department holds on file. An Illinois license is permission from the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation under the Collection Agency Act, with a $25,000 surety bond behind it where the licensee collects for others. 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", New York, California and Illinois bands read "continuously licensed", and Florida bands read "continuously registered", never interchangeably. Illinois also requires a bond, but the register records the license, so no Illinois page says "bonded". 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.

California's register works differently, and the site says so rather than smoothing it over. The department publishes only the licenses currently in force, with one status word, Active, and no ending word or date. A license that ends, for any reason, simply leaves the list. So a California entry states the date the license was last on the list and stops there: it never says revoked, suspended or surrendered unless a department order does, because those are different things and the list does not say which. And because the state licensed no collection agencies for thirty years before the Act, and the earliest licenses on the register are dated January 2023, every California agency sits in the newest band until 2028 at the earliest. The band measures the register, not the company's age.

Illinois keeps ended licenses on its register, and the site reads the status words strictly. The Department's register carries thirteen status words on the agency licenses themselves (branch office rows are labeled as such and not counted here), verbatim, from active to revoked. This site treats an Illinois license as in force only when the register records it as active or on probation and its term has not expired; an expired term ends the license whatever the word beside it says. A license on probation is a license in force, and the discipline behind it is not inferred from the word: a regulator's action appears on this site only as a public enforcement record, quoted from the regulator's own document.

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. Extended September 2, 2026 for Florida and California, again ahead of the first California agency, and September 3, 2026 for Illinois, ahead of the first Illinois agency. The ordering rule and the boundaries did not change on any of those days.

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. When the full tally was last taken, on August 17, 2026, 66 of the 528 bond filings behind agencies listed here were absent from the portal, affecting 52 firms. Sixty-two of those were bonds that had already been canceled, some of them in the 1990s: the state has stopped returning old closed filings, and nothing about those bonds has changed.

The figure that matters to a reader is the other one: bonds shown here as currently in force that the portal does not return. The weekly re-check of every published bond flags each of these, and the count moves. It was four on August 17 and August 24, 2026, and five on every weekly run since August 31, 2026, most recently September 21. All five were filed between August and November 2024. When Texas moved to the newer portal, it loaded its records from a copy taken around mid-2024, and many bonds filed in the months after that copy never arrived. Every bond filed from January 2025 onward is in the portal.

The older search is no longer a record of the present. It has taken no new filing since August 2025, and it has not recorded later cancellations either: bonds the newer portal shows as canceled since then still read as active there. We captured it in full again on September 22, 2026 and found no change to any of its 8,170 records since July. It can show that a bond was in force. It cannot show that the bond still is.

So, from September 23, 2026, a Texas bond is described as current only while our weekly check keeps confirming it on the state's live portal. If three weeks pass without that confirmation, the profile stops calling the bond current and says instead when it was last confirmed. It does not say the bond has ended, because nothing shows that either. Where the two systems disagree, the reading that understates the agency is the one used and the disagreement is recorded.

Added August 17, 2026; in-force figure restated September 6, 2026 from the weekly run of August 31; revised September 23, 2026, when the older search was found to have stopped recording changes and profiles stopped calling unconfirmed bonds current. The in-force count comes from that weekly re-check and is restated here when it moves; the full 66-of-528 tally is taken by hand and carries the date it was taken.

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?

A register fact is verified against that state's register itself, never against a copy of it or a company's word for it. A fact that comes from a company is published as supplied, sourced and dated, and labeled as theirs. Every record is put through the same fixed battery of checks before it can appear, and a check that could not run never counts as a check that passed.

A record that clears every check publishes, and carries its source link and last-checked date. A record that raises a question stops there and is ruled on by a person. What has published is then audited back against the original sources by sample, and the sampling rate tightens the moment an audit finds an error. If a fact cannot be verified it stays unpublished; a blank on this site means "not yet proven", never "probably fine". Any published fact can be challenged under the corrections policy, which is free and open to anyone. The gate is selective by design: as of the last rebuild, 569 companies have been screened against public records to publish 501 register-checked profiles.

Common questions about the method

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