A small rise against a much bigger fall
Over the most recent 90-day window tracked by Veste, the uphold rate for personal loan decisions published by the Financial Ombudsman rose to 12.8%, up from 9.1% in the prior 90-day window. That is a rise of 3.7 percentage points. At the same time, the number of decisions fell sharply, from 1,694 in the prior window to 1,178 in the current one, a drop of 516 decisions, or 30.5%.
Taken alone, a rising uphold rate on falling volume might look like the start of a shift in how personal loan complaints are being decided. Set against the trend running back to June 2024, it looks more like a pause, or a modest correction, within a decline that has been running for well over a year.
The numbers in context
Across the full personal loan dataset, Veste has recorded 22,760 decisions since 2013, of which 5,535 were upheld, 2,405 partially upheld and 14,820 not upheld, giving an all-time uphold rate of 29.6%. That compares with a baseline uphold rate of 28.8% across the entire corpus of 401,815 decisions Veste holds on Financial Ombudsman outcomes, of the kind used across products and firms. Personal loans, in other words, sit close to the average complaint category, historically speaking, but the recent trajectory has taken the product's uphold rate well below that baseline.
The year-on-year figures make the scale of the longer decline clear. In 2022, personal loan decisions were upheld at a rate of 37.5% across 3,034 decisions. That fell to 29.9% in 2023 (2,089 decisions), rose slightly to 33.3% in 2024 (1,980 decisions), then fell sharply to 21.4% in 2025 (2,281 decisions) and has fallen further still to 10.7% so far in 2026 (2,763 decisions). Each of these annual figures meets Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the year-on-year comparison is not resting on thin data.
Set against that backdrop, a rise from 9.1% to 12.8% in the most recent 90-day window is real, and both windows meet the minimum sample size needed for a reliable comparison. But it is a modest correction inside a much larger, multi-year fall, not a reversal of it.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly series runs for 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. It shows uphold rates bouncing between 20% and 44% through the second half of 2024, before beginning a more sustained decline from mid-2025 onwards.
In June 2024, 100 decisions were published with an uphold rate of 32.5%. By September 2024, that had risen to 44.4% across 170 decisions, the highest monthly rate in the series. From there the rate drifted down through the winter, sitting at 21.2% in July 2025 (179 decisions) and 20.5% in August 2025 (156 decisions).
The steepest fall came over the winter of 2025 into 2026. December 2025 saw 457 decisions published with an uphold rate of 10.8%, a sharp increase in volume alongside a much lower uphold rate than earlier in the series. January 2026 brought 566 decisions at a 10.1% uphold rate, February 2026 saw 617 decisions at 8.3%, and March 2026 recorded 767 decisions, the highest monthly total in the series, at a 10.5% uphold rate. April and May 2026 saw uphold rates edge up slightly, to 14.2% (288 decisions) and 14.8% (304 decisions) respectively, before June 2026 fell back to 9.7% across 221 decisions, the most recent month in the series.
This pattern is consistent with the period comparison. The current 90-day window includes some of the higher-uphold months of April and May 2026 as well as the lower June figure, while the prior 90-day window sits deeper in the low point of December 2025 to February 2026. The rise Veste has identified in the period comparison appears to reflect this uneven monthly pattern rather than a clean or sustained change in direction.
Firms in the mix
Veste's firm-level data for personal loans covers ten firms with sufficient sample size to report. As the data records the business name exactly as it appears on each decision, subsidiaries of the same banking group are counted separately rather than rolled up into a parent figure. Barclays Partner Finance decisions, for example, appear in this dataset under the name Clydesdale Financial Services Limited.
Among the ten firms with sufficient volume, uphold rates vary considerably. Shawbrook Bank Limited recorded 1,857 decisions at an uphold rate of 17.5%. Clydesdale Financial Services Limited recorded 1,272 decisions at 16.2%. Mitsubishi HC Capital UK Plc recorded 874 decisions at 13.6%. National Westminster Bank Plc recorded 768 decisions at 19.1%, and Lloyds Bank PLC recorded 693 decisions at 15.4%.
At the other end of the range, three firms show markedly higher uphold rates. Creation Consumer Finance Ltd recorded 680 decisions with an uphold rate of 65.5%, the highest among the firms with sufficient sample size. Everyday Lending Limited recorded 664 decisions at 56.9%, and Loans 2 Go Limited recorded 607 decisions at 54.3%. Madison CF UK Limited sits in between, with 588 decisions at 33.1%, and Provident Personal Credit Limited recorded 516 decisions at 27.0%.
These figures are lifetime totals for each firm rather than figures confined to the recent 90-day window, so they cannot explain the specific short-term movement identified above. But they illustrate that the personal loan category is not homogeneous. Firms whose lending has tended toward higher-risk, higher-cost credit show substantially higher uphold rates than the larger mainstream lenders in this dataset, a pattern consistent with the nature of irresponsible lending complaints, which Veste separately records at an uphold rate of 34.1% across 8,863 decisions, the largest single complaint category linked to this product.
What may be driving the pattern, and what is interpretation
The observed evidence is this: personal loan decision volumes rose sharply from December 2025 through March 2026, and the uphold rate over that period fell to some of the lowest levels in the 25-month series. Volumes then eased in April, May and June 2026, and the uphold rate recovered somewhat, though it remained well below the levels seen in most of 2024.
One plausible reading is that a surge of decisions on a particular type of complaint, perhaps a batch of similar cases processed together, temporarily diluted the uphold rate during the high-volume winter months, and that the subsequent fall in volume allowed a different mix of cases to come through with a somewhat higher uphold rate. Veste's data does not identify the specific issue types driving the December-to-March surge, so this remains an interpretation rather than a demonstrated cause. The related claim categories, such as irresponsible lending and Section 75 goods and services complaints, both features in the individual decisions below, are available context but not proof of what changed in aggregate.
Individual decisions as illustration
Four personal loan decisions published on 15 June 2026 illustrate the range of issues in this category, though none should be read as evidence of a broader pattern.
In one case, a complainant alleged that Barclays Partner Finance, recorded here under Clydesdale Financial Services Limited, had irresponsibly provided ten interest-free loans for mobile phone purchases between October 2022 and January 2024. The ombudsman found the firm's checks reasonable for the first five loans, and while further checks should have been made from the sixth loan onwards, bank statements showed no sign of financial difficulty, and the complaint was not upheld.
A second case, also against Clydesdale Financial Services Limited, involved a Section 75 claim linked to a £16,065 loan used for a timeshare purchase in 2008. The resort went into liquidation in 2019, and the complainant sought reimbursement, but was unable to provide documentation connecting the credit agreement to the specific timeshare. The complaint was not upheld.
A third decision concerned a £2,500 loan from Oakbrook Finance Limited. The ombudsman judged the firm's pre-lending checks proportionate given the complainant's account history and verified income, and did not uphold the complaint despite a modest calculated disposable income.
A fourth case involved Santander UK Plc and a £9,000 loan taken out by a complainant who was the victim of an investment scam. The ombudsman found Santander had no reasonable basis to know of the scam when approving the loan and could not have prevented the resulting losses, though it recommended a sympathetic approach to repayment. The complaint was not upheld.
These four cases were all decided against the complainant, but they represent a small, non-random sample published on a single date and should not be taken to indicate the overall balance of outcomes across the product.
What the data does and does not show
The data shows a 3.7 percentage point rise in the personal loan uphold rate between two 90-day windows, on a falling decision count, and both windows meet the minimum sample threshold Veste applies. It also shows a much larger decline in the uphold rate across 2022 to 2026, from 37.5% to 10.7% on a year-on-year basis, alongside sharply rising decision volumes in the most recent 25-month monthly series.
What it does not show is why volumes rose so steeply in the winter of 2025 into 2026, nor what specific issue types or firms were behind that surge, since the firm-level figures in this dataset are lifetime totals rather than figures for the recent window. It also does not indicate whether the uptick seen in April and May 2026 will continue, given that June 2026 uphold rates fell back again to 9.7%.
Conclusion
The 3.7 percentage point rise in the personal loan uphold rate is a genuine feature of the two most recent 90-day windows, not a statistical artefact of tiny samples, since both windows exceed Veste's minimum threshold. But readers should weigh it against the far larger year-on-year decline running from 37.5% in 2022 to 10.7% so far in 2026, and against a monthly series in which the uphold rate has fluctuated by wide margins from one month to the next, including a fall back to 9.7% in the most recent month recorded. The more useful takeaway for anyone tracking this product is that the underlying trend remains firmly downward, and a single 90-day uptick, however real, sits well inside the range of movement this series has shown before.