A rate rise built on far fewer decisions
In the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, National Westminster Bank Public Limited Company recorded an uphold rate of 14.8% across 145 published Financial Ombudsman decisions. In the preceding 90-day window, the uphold rate was 10.2% across 285 decisions. That is a rise of 4.6 percentage points, but it has arrived alongside a fall of 140 decisions between the two periods, a drop of 49.1%.
Both windows clear Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not disqualified on size grounds alone. But a rate calculated on 145 decisions is inherently more sensitive to a handful of individual outcomes than one calculated on 285, and readers should treat the 4.6 percentage point movement as suggestive rather than conclusive, particularly given how sharply overall volume has fallen in the same window.
The headline numbers
Across the full period Veste holds data for NatWest, running from a first published decision on 18 March 2025 to the most recent on 15 June 2026, the bank has featured in 1,179 published Ombudsman decisions. Of these, 118 were fully upheld, 84 were partially upheld, and 976 were not upheld, producing an overall uphold rate of 13.6% under Veste's methodology, which counts a partial uphold as half a decision in the numerator.
That overall figure of 13.6% sits well below the wider Financial Ombudsman corpus baseline that Veste tracks: across 401,815 decisions with a recorded outcome, the corpus-wide uphold rate is 28.8%. NatWest's published decisions, taken as a whole, have therefore upheld complaints at roughly half the rate seen across the full range of firms and products in Veste's dataset. This is a description of the published decision population, not a judgement on the bank's overall complaint handling, which will include many complaints that are resolved before reaching a published Ombudsman decision.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly series for NatWest runs for 16 months, from March 2025 to June 2026. Across that run, the uphold rate has moved between a low of 5.0% and highs above 25% in different months, without a sustained upward or downward trajectory that would clearly explain the latest quarterly rise.
March 2025 opened the series with 47 decisions and an uphold rate of 28.7%, the highest single month in the run. That was followed by a sharp fall to 11.5% in April 2025 on 52 decisions. Through the summer and autumn of 2025, monthly totals rose considerably, reaching 112 decisions in September 2025 with an uphold rate of 10.3%, and 146 decisions in March 2026, also at 10.3%.
The most recent three months in the series show the volume collapse that underpins the period comparison. April 2026 recorded just 20 decisions, with two upheld and two partially upheld, giving an uphold rate of 15.0%. May 2026 recorded 34 decisions, six upheld and five partially upheld, for a rate of 25.0%, the second-highest of the entire series. June 2026 then recorded 20 decisions, none fully upheld and two partially upheld, for a rate of 5.0%, one of the lowest months on record.
That sequence, 15.0%, then 25.0%, then 5.0%, illustrates precisely why a single quarterly comparison built on a much smaller pool of decisions needs careful handling. The elevated 90-day rate is being driven by a mixture of months that individually swing in both directions, not a smooth upward slope.
Year-on-year context
Looked at annually rather than by 90-day window, the picture runs in the opposite direction to the recent quarterly comparison. In 2025, NatWest featured in 769 published decisions with an uphold rate of 14.4%. In 2026 to date, the bank features in 410 decisions with an uphold rate of 12.1%. On this longer annual view, the uphold rate has fallen, not risen, even though the most recent 90-day window shows an increase relative to its immediate predecessor.
This is not a contradiction so much as a reminder that short comparison windows and full-year figures can move differently when monthly volumes are themselves volatile. The annual 2026 total of 410 decisions is, in any case, a partial year, since Veste's corpus cutoff for this article is 1 August 2026 and the newest decision in the corpus overall is dated 15 June 2026.
What sits underneath: issue types
Veste's related-category data, drawn from the wider corpus rather than filtered specifically to NatWest, gives some sense of where uphold rates tend to run higher or lower across comparable complaint types. Irresponsible lending complaints across the corpus show an uphold rate of 19.9% on 188 decisions. Credit file and adverse marker disputes show 17.6% on 37 decisions. Mortgage administration and arrears handling shows 16.7% on 51 decisions. Service failures generally sit at 16.5% on 115 decisions, and account administration errors at 15.4% on 78 decisions. Card and payment disputes run at 14.9% on 94 decisions. Account closure without notice sits lower, at 8.8% on 74 decisions, and fraud reimbursement under the Authorised Push Payment scheme sits lowest of the categories shown, at 8.3% on 420 decisions.
These figures describe categories across Veste's broader dataset rather than NatWest specifically, but they provide useful context for the individual decisions below, several of which touch on fraud liability and lending assessments, both areas where corpus-wide uphold rates run towards the lower end of the range shown here.
Individual decisions as illustration
Four recent published decisions involving NatWest give a flavour of the kinds of disputes reaching the Ombudsman, though none should be read as representative of the bank's complaint handling as a whole; they are illustrations, not evidence of a pattern.
In a decision dated 15 June 2026 (DRN-6429036), a customer complained that NatWest cancelled her debit card without informing her and that she continued attempting to use the cancelled card for around nine months. The Ombudsman found NatWest had followed proper procedure in cancelling a compromised card and issuing a replacement, and noted the customer had multiple opportunities between February and May 2025 to query declined transactions. The complaint was not upheld.
In a separate decision from the same date (DRN-6360567), a customer complained that NatWest held him liable for balances across three credit cards run up after he was blackmailed and coerced into disclosing his banking details. The Ombudsman found that his consent, though given under duress, was valid under the Payment Service Regulations 2017, making the transactions authorised, and that NatWest's monitoring obligations were not breached. The complaint was not upheld, though the Ombudsman reminded the bank to treat the customer sympathetically given his financial difficulties.
A decision dated 11 June 2026 (DRN-6274972) concerned a £4,000 credit card issued in October 2022, which the customer argued had been lent irresponsibly. The Ombudsman found NatWest's affordability checks and credit reference checks were reasonable and proportionate, and did not uphold the complaint.
Another decision from 11 June 2026 (DRN-5874267) involved a charity that complained NatWest failed to provide suitable accounts for managing client money, after being declined for a Business Current Account that would have unlocked higher payment limits. The Ombudsman found NatWest was entitled to set and keep confidential its own account opening criteria, and did not uphold the complaint.
All four of these illustrative decisions were not upheld, consistent with the bank's overall published pattern in which not upheld decisions substantially outnumber full or partial upholds.
What the data does and does not show
The data shows that NatWest's uphold rate rose by 4.6 percentage points between two 90-day windows, from 10.2% to 14.8%, while the number of published decisions fell by 140, a 49.1% drop. It shows that this movement sits within a 16-month monthly series that has itself swung between 5.0% and above 25% without a settled direction, and that the annual comparison between 2025 (14.4% on 769 decisions) and 2026 to date (12.1% on 410 decisions) points the other way.
The data does not show why decision volume fell so sharply in the most recent months, nor does it establish that NatWest's complaint handling has changed. Published Ombudsman decisions are not the same population as all complaints made to a firm; they represent a subset of disputes that reached a formal published outcome, filtered by whichever cases were escalated and decided within the period. A fall in published decision volume could reflect changes in referral patterns, resolution before a final decision, or simple timing of publication, none of which is captured in this dataset.
It is also worth noting, as Veste does across all firm-level analysis, that firms are counted by the business name recorded on each decision. Subsidiaries or related entities within the same banking group are not rolled up into a single parent figure, so this analysis speaks only to decisions recorded specifically against National Westminster Bank Public Limited Company.
The practical implication
For anyone tracking NatWest's Ombudsman record, the useful takeaway is not that the uphold rate has risen in a single quarter, but that the underlying monthly volumes are volatile enough that any single 90-day comparison should be read alongside the full monthly series and the annual figures before drawing a conclusion. On the data available up to 1 August 2026, the annual trend for NatWest points to a slightly lower uphold rate in 2026 than in 2025, even though the most recent quarter alone shows a rise on a much smaller sample.