A sharp rise, but on a shrinking base
The uphold rate for payday and short-term credit complaints decided by the Financial Ombudsman rose by 5.9 percentage points in the most recent 90-day window, moving from 14.9% to 20.8%. That sounds like a meaningful shift in how these cases are being decided. But the rise came alongside a fall in decision volume of 54, a 47.4% drop from 114 decisions in the prior window to 60 in the latest one. Fewer decisions, on a category that already produces highly variable monthly outcomes, is the first thing to weigh before reading too much into the increase.
Both windows clear Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so this is not a case of comparing a handful of rulings against another handful. But 60 decisions is still a modest base for a category that has, over its full published history, generated 9,831 decisions. A change of this size on a sample that size can easily reflect which cases happened to be published in a given quarter, rather than a shift in how firms are lending or how the Ombudsman is approaching them.
The numbers in full
Across the entire published history of payday and short-term credit decisions analysed by Veste, from 2013-04-04 to 2026-06-11, the Ombudsman has recorded 9,831 decisions: 2,487 upheld, 4,855 partially upheld and 2,489 not upheld. Using Veste's uphold-rate definition, which counts a partial uphold as half a full uphold, that gives an all-time uphold rate for the category of 50.0%. That is well above the uphold rate across the whole corpus of 401,815 decisions Veste has analysed, which stands at 28.8%. Payday and short-term credit complaints, in other words, have historically been upheld at a considerably higher rate than the average financial services complaint reaching the Ombudsman.
Set against that long-run average of 50.0%, the current 90-day rate of 20.8% looks low, not high. The 5.9-point rise is real, and it is measured against the immediately preceding quarter, but it takes the category from one low point to a slightly less low point. It does not represent a return to the historical norm for this product type.
What the year-on-year figures show
The annual figures put the recent movement in a longer context. Payday and short-term credit uphold rates by year were 40.2% in 2022 (461 decisions), 25.9% in 2023 (288 decisions), 34.1% in 2024 (167 decisions), 23.8% in 2025 (162 decisions) and 16.7% so far in 2026 (168 decisions). Every one of these annual samples meets Veste's minimum sample size.
The pattern is not a straight line down, 2024 bounced above 2023, but the direction across the five years is unmistakably downward, from 40.2% to 16.7%. Against that backdrop, a single 90-day uptick from 14.9% to 20.8% sits well within a category that has been trending toward lower uphold rates for several years, even allowing for the year-to-year wobble. The current annual rate for 2026, at 16.7%, remains close to the lower end of that five-year range.
Reading the monthly detail
Veste's monthly series covers 25 months, from 2024-06-01 to 2026-06-01, and it shows just how much this category swings from one month to the next. Uphold rates ranged from as low as 7.4% in January 2026 (34 decisions, none upheld outright) to 80.0% in July 2024, albeit on only 5 decisions that month. Several months in the most recent run were particularly weak: December 2025 produced an 8.0% uphold rate across 25 decisions, January 2026 produced 7.4% across 34 decisions, and March 2026 produced 15.6% across 45 decisions.
Then the pattern shifted. May 2026 recorded a 36.7% uphold rate across 15 decisions, and June 2026, the final and thinnest month in the series with just 2 decisions, showed a 75.0% rate. It is these later months that are doing the work behind the 5.9-point rise in the 90-day comparison. A jump built substantially on 15 and then 2 decisions is not evidence of a durable change in Ombudsman approach or lender behaviour. It is evidence that this category, at the monthly level, moves around a great deal, and the most recent data points happen to sit on the higher side of that range.
Firm mix: a caveat on how these figures are built
Veste's top firm rankings, all firms below meeting the minimum sample of 30, show wide variation in uphold rates within the category. Express Finance (Bromley) Limited shows the highest uphold rate among the ranked firms, at 70.5% across 278 decisions. WDFC UK Limited follows at 68.8% across 709 decisions. MEM Consumer Finance Limited sits at 62.2% across 438 decisions, and Casheuronet UK LLC at 59.1% across 1,298 decisions, the largest single firm total in the ranking. At the other end, Gain Credit LLC shows a 32.4% uphold rate across 572 decisions, and Morses Club PLC 35.4% across 284 decisions.
These are firm-level figures for the whole published history of each firm's decisions, not for the recent 90-day window specifically, and Veste has not been supplied with a firm-by-firm breakdown of the latest quarter. It would therefore be wrong to attribute the recent rise or fall in the category's uphold rate to any single named firm. It is also worth noting, as a matter of method rather than suspicion, that firms are counted here by the exact business name recorded on each decision. Where a lending group operates through more than one legal entity, those entities appear as separate rows in this data and are not combined into a single group total.
What might be driving the pattern, and what the data cannot tell us
The related claim-type data offers some context on what these complaints are typically about. Irresponsible lending is by far the largest related category, with 9,236 decisions and a 50.7% uphold rate, close to the all-time rate for the product overall. This is consistent with the individual decisions Veste has reviewed. In one, concerning Gain Credit LLC trading as Lending Stream (DRN-6347905, decided 2026-06-11), the ombudsman found that while the firm had carried out reasonable affordability checks on a run of five loans, it had failed to properly act on what those checks showed: the complainant's actual income was considerably below the figure declared, leaving only a small monthly surplus once expenses and repayments were accounted for. Loans 2 to 5 were found to have been lent unfairly and the complaint was partially upheld.
A second decision, concerning Quidie Limited trading as Fernovo (DRN-6311515, decided 2026-05-28), reached the opposite conclusion on similar subject matter. There, the ombudsman found the firm had conducted proportionate checks for two smaller, shorter loans, verified income through a credit reference agency, and found no signs of financial hardship, so the complaint was not upheld despite the loans being taken in quick succession.
A third decision, concerning APFIN LTD trading as cashasap.co.uk (DRN-6323922, decided 2026-06-03), turned not on lending decisions at all but on debt collection conduct toward a customer who had disclosed a health vulnerability. The ombudsman upheld the complaint because the firm had not varied its standard contact approach after being made aware of the customer's circumstances, and awarded £150 compensation.
These three decisions illustrate the range of issues within the category, from affordability assessment to collections conduct, and show that outcomes depend heavily on the specific checks a firm carried out and what those checks revealed. They are examples, not a representative sample of the recent 90-day movement, and none of them should be read as establishing a pattern of conduct by the named firms beyond what each individual decision found.
What the data does and does not show
The data supports three separate observations. First, the category's uphold rate rose by 5.9 percentage points quarter on quarter, from 14.9% to 20.8%, while volume fell sharply. Second, the annual figures show a longer decline in uphold rates from 40.2% in 2022 to 16.7% so far in 2026. Third, the category's uphold rate across its entire published history, 50.0%, remains well above the 28.8% average across all Ombudsman decisions in Veste's corpus.
What the data does not show is a change in lender conduct, a change in regulatory approach, or a reliable signal from the most recent quarter alone. With only 60 decisions in the latest window, and given how much the monthly figures swing, from single-digit percentages in some months to majorities in others, this looks more consistent with the ordinary noise of a modestly sized, falling-volume dataset than with a new trend.
The practical implication
For anyone tracking this category, the useful takeaway is not the quarter-on-quarter rise itself but the volume behind it. Decision numbers have fallen substantially, and the multi-year direction of the uphold rate has been downward since 2022. A single quarter's increase, built on a smaller sample than usual and skewed by a handful of high-uphold months at the very end of the series, is not sufficient on its own to say the tide has turned for complainants in this category. The next two or three quarters, once decision volumes recover to more typical levels, will show whether the recent uptick holds or was simply where a thin run of monthly figures happened to land.