A small rise against a much larger fall
In the most recent 90-day window covered by Veste's data, the Financial Ombudsman published 1,178 decisions on personal loan complaints, of which 12.8% were upheld or partially upheld under Veste's uphold-rate definition. In the preceding 90-day window, there were 1,694 decisions and an uphold rate of 9.1%. That is a rise of 3.7 percentage points in the uphold rate, alongside a drop of 516 decisions, a fall of 30.5% in volume. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not resting on a handful of cases. But the direction of travel deserves care: a rate can move for reasons that have nothing to do with how firms are treating customers, including simply which types of cases the Ombudsman happened to clear in a given quarter.
The headline figure across the entire personal loan dataset, spanning decisions first seen on 2013-04-02 and last seen on 2026-06-15, is an uphold rate of 29.6% across 22,760 decisions, comprising 5,535 upheld, 2,405 partially upheld and 14,820 not upheld. That all-time average sits close to the corpus-wide baseline of 28.8% across all 401,815 published decisions Veste holds, which suggests personal loans have not historically been treated markedly differently from Ombudsman decisions in general. The recent 90-day windows, at 12.8% and 9.1%, sit well below both figures.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly trend for personal loans covers 25 months, from 2024-06-01 to 2026-06-01. It tells a clearer story than the two-window comparison alone. In June 2024 the uphold rate stood at 32.5% from 100 decisions. It climbed through the summer, reaching 44.4% in September 2024 from 170 decisions, before drifting down again. By June 2025 it had fallen to 23.0% from 150 decisions, and it kept falling through the second half of 2025: 21.2% in July, 20.5% in August, 21.9% in September, 19.2% in October, 19.0% in November.
Then came a sharp step down. December 2025 saw 457 decisions, more than double most earlier months in the series, with an uphold rate of just 10.8%. January 2026 brought 566 decisions at 10.1%, February 2026 brought 617 decisions at 8.3%, the lowest point in the whole series, and March 2026 brought 767 decisions, the largest single month, at 10.5%. Volumes then fell back: April 2026 recorded 288 decisions at 14.2%, May 2026 recorded 304 decisions at 14.8%, and the partial month of June 2026 recorded 221 decisions at 9.7%.
Set against that pattern, the period-on-period rise from 9.1% to 12.8% looks less like a reversal of the downward trend and more like a modest recovery from the trough recorded in December 2025 through March 2026, when monthly rates sat between 8.3% and 10.8% on unusually high volumes. The most recent months, April and May 2026, both came in above 14%, before June's partial figure fell back to 9.7%. Read together, the series looks more like a plateau with some bounce around it than a clean upward or downward line.
The longer view
Veste's year-on-year figures reinforce that the current low uphold rates are part of a multi-year pattern rather than a recent shock. In 2022, personal loan decisions totalled 3,034 with an uphold rate of 37.5%. In 2023, that was 2,089 decisions at 29.9%. In 2024, 1,980 decisions at 33.3%. In 2025, 2,281 decisions at 21.4%. So far in 2026, 2,763 decisions have produced an uphold rate of 10.7%, all measured against Veste's minimum sample threshold, which every one of these annual figures clears.
That progression, from 37.5% in 2022 down to 10.7% so far in 2026, is a much larger and steadier movement than the 3.7 percentage point rise recorded between the two most recent 90-day windows. It suggests that whatever is driving personal loan uphold rates lower has been operating for several years, and that the latest quarterly uptick is a small ripple on top of that longer decline rather than a sign it has ended.
Firms named on the decisions
Veste's data groups decisions by the business name recorded on each one, which means subsidiaries of the same banking group appear as separate entries rather than being rolled up into a parent company figure. Among firms meeting the minimum sample size, the ten largest by decision volume in the personal loan category showed a wide range of outcomes.
Shawbrook Bank Limited recorded the highest volume, with 1,857 decisions and an uphold rate of 17.5% (296 upheld, 58 partial, 1,503 not upheld). Clydesdale Financial Services Limited had 1,272 decisions at 16.2% (168 upheld, 75 partial, 1,029 not upheld). Mitsubishi HC Capital UK Plc had 874 decisions at 13.6%. National Westminster Bank Plc had 768 decisions at 19.1%, and Lloyds Bank PLC had 693 decisions at 15.4%.
A markedly different pattern appears among smaller-volume names further down the list. Creation Consumer Finance Ltd had 680 decisions with an uphold rate of 65.5% (413 upheld, 65 partial, 202 not upheld), the highest of the ten firms shown. Everyday Lending Limited had 664 decisions at 56.9%, and Loans 2 Go Limited had 607 decisions at 54.3%. Madison CF UK Limited had 588 decisions at 33.1%, and Provident Personal Credit Limited had 516 decisions at 27.0%.
The gap between the highest and lowest uphold rates among these ten firms, from 65.5% down to 13.6%, is far wider than the 3.7 percentage point period-on-period movement this article set out to examine. That spread across firms is a useful reminder that averaging all personal loan decisions together, as the period comparison and monthly trend necessarily do, can obscure very different experiences depending on which firm a complaint concerns. Veste's data does not allow us to say why any individual firm's rate differs from another's, only that the published decisions show it.
What appears to be driving the numbers, and what does not
The supplied related-category data offers some context. Irresponsible lending complaints, a category closely tied to personal loans, show an uphold rate of 34.1% across 8,863 decisions in Veste's wider dataset, above both the personal loan average and the recent quarterly rates. Three of the four illustrative decisions supplied for this period concerned irresponsible lending or connected claims, and all three were not upheld.
In one, a complainant argued that Barclays Partner Finance, trading 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 first five loans were supported by appropriate checks and no adverse credit history, and that although further checks should have been made from the sixth loan onward, bank statements showed no missed payments or signs of financial difficulty at the time. The complaint was not upheld, in part because the complainant did not disclose her actual circumstances until January 2025.
In a second, a complainant sought a Section 75 claim against the same lender over a timeshare loan taken out in 2008, after the timeshare resort went into liquidation in 2019. The Ombudsman found she could not provide documentation proving the credit agreement was connected to the specific timeshare that failed, a necessary condition for Section 75 liability, and the complaint was not upheld.
A third concerned Oakbrook Finance Limited and a £2,500 loan from June 2025. The Ombudsman found the firm's pre-lending checks were reasonable and proportionate, that the complainant had nine active accounts in good standing with no defaults or county court judgments, and that although her calculated disposable income was modest, this figure likely understated her true position because it included housing costs despite her living with parents. The complaint was not upheld.
A fourth decision, concerning Santander UK Plc, involved a complainant who took out a £9,000 loan and sent it along with £4,200 of her own savings to scammers as part of an investment fraud. The Ombudsman found Santander had no reasonable basis to suspect the scam when approving the loan and could not have prevented the fraud, so it was not required to refund the losses, though it was asked to work toward a sustainable repayment arrangement.
These four examples illustrate the kinds of reasoning behind not-upheld outcomes in this dataset, particularly around what checks a lender is expected to make and what evidence a complainant needs to provide. They are individual cases, not a representative sample, and should not be read as evidence of a general standard applied across the whole personal loan category.
What the data does not tell us
Veste's figures describe published Ombudsman decisions, not the total number of complaints made to any lender, and not complaints that were resolved before reaching a published decision. A falling volume of published decisions, as seen in the most recent 90-day window compared with the one before it, does not on its own indicate fewer complaints are being made; it may reflect changes in how cases move through the Ombudsman's process, seasonal effects, or simply which cases happened to be published within the dataset's cutoff. Equally, the 3.7 percentage point rise in the uphold rate cannot be attributed to any single firm, product feature or lending practice from this data alone.
The useful takeaway
Taken in isolation, a 3.7 percentage point rise in the personal loan uphold rate, from 9.1% to 12.8%, might look like a shift worth flagging on its own. Set against the monthly series and the year-on-year figures, it looks more like a recovery within a much larger multi-year decline, from an uphold rate of 37.5% in 2022 to 10.7% so far in 2026. Anyone using this data to assess a specific lender should look at that firm's own figures rather than the category average, given how widely uphold rates varied among the ten largest firms in this dataset, from 13.6% to 65.5%.