A falling uphold rate on a rising caseload
In the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, the Financial Ombudsman published 204 decisions involving payday and short-term lenders, up from 120 in the prior window, a rise of 84 decisions, or 70.0%. Over the same comparison, the uphold rate for this firm-type fell from 21.7% to 19.1%, a drop of 2.6 percentage points. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not resting on a handful of cases, though a move of 2.6 points on a base of 204 and 120 decisions is still a modest shift in absolute terms.
Veste's uphold rate is calculated as (upheld decisions + 0.5 × partially upheld decisions) ÷ total decisions, following the definition used across its published statistics. That formula means a lender can see its rate move even where the underlying pattern of full uphold, partial uphold and rejection changes only slightly, because partial upholds are weighted at half.
The numbers in context
Across the full period Veste holds data for, payday and short-term lender decisions run from 2013-04-10 to 2026-05-21, comprising 11,237 decisions, of which 3,086 were upheld, 4,425 partially upheld and 3,726 not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 47.2%. That headline figure sits well above the corpus-wide baseline uphold rate of 28.9% calculated across the full 399,501 decisions in Veste's database, indicating that short-term lending has historically generated a higher share of upheld or partially upheld complaints than the wider population of financial products the Ombudsman rules on. It is a category where complaints have tended to succeed, at least in part, more often than average.
But the direction of travel in this category has been downward for several years. Year-on-year figures show the uphold rate falling from 55.0% in 2022 (1,147 decisions) to 47.3% in 2023 (566 decisions), 38.6% in 2024 (298 decisions), 31.0% in 2025 (266 decisions) and 19.9% so far in 2026 (284 decisions). Each of these annual samples meets Veste's minimum threshold. The latest 90-day figure of 19.1% is broadly consistent with where 2026 has been running as a whole, rather than representing a sudden break from the year's pattern.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly series covers 25 months, from 2024-05-01 to 2026-05-01. It shows considerable month-to-month variation rather than a smooth decline. Uphold rates bounced between roughly a quarter and just above a half through much of 2024 and early 2025: 45.8% in May 2024, dropping to 23.7% in July 2024, recovering to 52.5% in October 2024, then falling again to 21.4% in February 2025. Since the autumn of 2025, monthly totals have grown substantially alongside generally lower uphold rates. September 2025 saw 41 decisions at a 29.3% uphold rate; volumes climbed further to 52 decisions in February 2026, 67 in March 2026 and 83 in April 2026, with uphold rates of 20.2%, 22.4% and 15.7% respectively. May 2026, the most recent month in the series, recorded 45 decisions at a 21.1% uphold rate.
The combination of rising monthly volumes and lower uphold rates in late 2025 and early 2026 is consistent with the 90-day period comparison, and suggests the recent fall in the uphold rate is part of a pattern that has been building for several months rather than a one-off event confined to the latest window.
Firm mix: who is publishing decisions
Veste's top-firm table for this category, which covers the full history rather than the latest 90-day window alone, shows wide variation in uphold rates between individual lenders, all of which meet the minimum sample size. Casheuronet UK LLC has the highest total volume, with 1,472 decisions and a 58.4% uphold rate (460 upheld, 799 partially upheld, 213 not upheld). Loans 2 Go Limited (772 decisions, 58.0% uphold rate) and Everyday Lending Limited (768 decisions, 57.7%) sit at similarly elevated levels, as does Lending Stream Llc (352 decisions, 58.1%).
At the other end, Provident Personal Credit Limited has a 29.3% uphold rate across 805 decisions, and Gain Credit LLC, trading in some decisions as Drafty, has a 33.1% uphold rate across 928 decisions. Elevate Credit International Limited sits in between at 49.0% across 1,163 decisions, with the great majority of its outcomes (982 of 1,163) falling into the partially upheld category rather than full uphold or full rejection. MYJAR Limited records a 35.3% uphold rate across 416 decisions, and Evergreen Finance London Limited, which trades as MoneyBoat.co.uk, sits at 47.4% across 351 decisions.
This spread matters for interpreting the category-wide figures. Veste counts firms by the name recorded on each individual Ombudsman decision, so entities that are part of the same wider corporate or banking group, or that trade under different names, appear separately in this table and are not combined. A shift in the overall payday and short-term lender uphold rate can therefore reflect a change in which firms are generating published decisions, rather than a change in how any single lender's disputes are being resolved.
What may be driving the recent movement
The supplied data does not identify a cause for the fall in uphold rate, and Veste is not attributing it to any specific policy or business change at any named firm. What the data does show is that the fall in the uphold rate has coincided with a substantial rise in the volume of published decisions, from 120 to 204 across the two most recent 90-day windows, and that the categories of complaint most associated with this firm-type, notably irresponsible lending (9,659 decisions across the wider category, 48.6% uphold rate), have themselves shown lower uphold rates than short-term lending's own historic average of 47.2%.
A rising volume of decisions with a falling uphold rate is consistent with several different explanations: more complaints being brought that ultimately do not succeed, lenders' affordability or fraud-detection processes performing differently on newer lending, or simply a change in which firms and case types are being decided in a given quarter. The data supplied to Veste cannot distinguish between these possibilities, and no single explanation should be assumed from the aggregate figures alone.
Individual decisions as illustration
Veste's case examples for the most recent decisions in this category, all not upheld, illustrate the range of issues reaching final decision rather than establish any trend. One, decided on 2026-05-20, concerned Evergreen Finance London Limited trading as MoneyBoat.co.uk, where a complainant argued a £600 loan advanced in March 2026 had been lent irresponsibly. The Ombudsman found the lender's income and expenditure checks, which assessed disposable income of £737 a month against a weekly repayment of £54.65, were proportionate to a loan of that size and term, and did not uphold the complaint, while reminding the lender to treat the complainant fairly over the outstanding balance.
A second, against Gain Credit LLC trading as Drafty, examined the lender's handling of a revolving credit account after the complainant fell into financial difficulty, including a payment arrangement reducing monthly payments to £22 and a subsequent default when an income and expenditure assessment showed no disposable income. The Ombudsman found the lender had handled the difficulty appropriately and did not uphold the complaint.
These decisions do not, individually or together, indicate anything about the broader uphold-rate trend. They are included to show the kind of dispute reaching final decision in this category during the period, not as evidence for or against any statistical pattern.
The longer-term picture and what it does not tell us
Taken over the full run of data, from 2013-04-10 to 2026-05-21, short-term lending has produced 11,237 published decisions with an uphold rate of 47.2%, well above the 28.9% baseline across all decisions in Veste's corpus. Annual figures show that rate has fallen every year from 2022 (55.0%) to the year-to-date figure for 2026 (19.9%), alongside a decline in annual decision volume from 1,147 in 2022 to 298 in 2024 before volumes rose again to 284 so far in 2026.
What this data cannot tell us is whether underlying lending practice has improved, whether the Ombudsman's approach to particular issue types has shifted, or whether the mix of firms and case types reaching a final decision has simply changed over time. Published Ombudsman decisions are also not the same population as all complaints made to a firm; many complaints are resolved earlier, without reaching the published decision stage that Veste's data captures.
The implication for readers
The clearest practical point from this data is that both the level and the direction of the uphold rate for payday and short-term lenders have been moving for some time, and the latest 90-day fall of 2.6 percentage points is consistent with, rather than a departure from, that pattern. Anyone assessing an individual lender's standing in this data should look at that lender's own figures, given the wide spread between, for example, Casheuronet UK LLC's 58.4% and Provident Personal Credit Limited's 29.3%, rather than relying on the category-wide rate alone.