Almost everything about borrowing is a judgement call. Whether a particular company is registered to lend to someone in your state is not — it is a matter of record, held in registries that anyone can search for free, in a few minutes, before any application is submitted or any personal information is handed over.
This page is about performing that check and reading the result honestly. It contains no rates, no terms, no offers, and no comparison of lenders, because those are not what a licence record tells you.
Consumer lending in the United States is licensed at state level. A company is authorised to lend to residents of a particular state, and the same company may hold authority in a dozen states and none in the thirteenth. Where it is not authorised, the protections a borrower normally has — the state's own rules on what may be charged and how collection may be conducted, and the regulator who enforces them — are far harder to invoke.
The check also happens before you have given anything away. A loan application asks for a full identity: name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, employer, bank details. That information has value independent of any loan, and once submitted it cannot be recalled. Searching a public registry costs nothing and reveals nothing about you.
There is a practical reason too. A company that is registered is findable, has a recorded address and officers, and can be complained about to a named regulator. One that is not may be perfectly legitimate and outside the scope of the registry you searched — or may be nothing at all — and the whole point of the check is to know which conversation you are in before continuing.
There is no single national list of everyone allowed to lend money. Four public sources cover most of what a consumer needs, and each answers a different question.
| Source | Answers | Does not answer |
|---|---|---|
| NMLS Consumer Access | Whether a company or individual is registered in the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System, which states the licence covers, and the licence status and history | Whether the entity is honest, or whether a specific offer is lawful |
| Your state's financial regulator | The authoritative list for that state, including licence types NMLS does not cover, plus enforcement actions and consumer alerts | Anything about other states |
| Secretary of State business registry | Whether the legal entity exists, when it was formed, its registered agent and its standing | Any lending authority whatsoever — company registration is not a lending licence |
| CFPB consumer complaint database | Complaints submitted about the company, the product involved, and how the company responded | Whether any complaint was upheld |
Start with your own state's regulator. Every state financial regulator publishes a searchable licensee list and most publish enforcement actions alongside it; that combination is the most useful single page in this process, and it is the one that reflects your own state's law rather than a national average.
Search by the exact legal entity name as well as by the trading name. Marketing names and legal names frequently differ, and a search that finds nothing under the brand may find the licence immediately under the corporation.
A licence record is not a yes or no. It has fields, and four of them decide whether it means what you hope.
Active is one value among several. Surrendered, expired, revoked, suspended and terminated all appear in these registries, and a record can be found while describing an authority the company no longer holds.
Licences are listed per state. Confirm your own state appears, not merely that the company holds licences somewhere.
States license different activities separately — consumer lending, mortgage lending, brokering, debt collection, money transmission. A broker licence does not authorise lending, and a lender licence does not authorise collection.
Issue date, renewal date, and any recorded actions. A licence issued last month and one held for fifteen years are different facts, and both are shown.
Then compare the record with the company in front of you. Does the legal name match exactly? Does the registered address match the one on the website? If a phone number was given to you, does anything in the public record connect that number to this entity? A licence belonging to a similarly named company in another state is not a licence.
This is the section most often skipped and it matters more than the search itself, because a number quoted at you is not the same as a record found by you.
Two public sources hold complaints, and both are useful only when their limits are understood.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes a database of consumer complaints, including the product, the issue selected by the consumer, and the company's response. These are allegations. A complaint has not been adjudicated, and volume tracks company size as much as company conduct. What is worth reading is the pattern: whether many complaints describe the same specific issue, and whether the company responded at all.
The Better Business Bureau publishes business profiles with its own ratings and complaint records. BBB is a private organisation, not a regulator; accreditation is a paid relationship and its absence carries no regulatory meaning. Its ratings do, however, reflect one thing worth noticing — whether a business responded to complaints filed against it. A profile stating that a business failed to respond is a factual observation about behaviour rather than an opinion about quality.
Read both alongside the state regulator's enforcement page, which is the only one of the three carrying legal weight. An enforcement action is a determination; a complaint is a statement someone made.
If something has already gone wrong, the destination depends on what happened, and going to the right one first saves weeks.
Your state financial regulator handles licensing and conduct by lenders operating in your state, including unlicensed activity. This is the first stop for anything involving a company that should have been licensed and was not.
The CFPB takes consumer complaints about financial products and forwards them to the company for response, publishing the outcome in the database described above.
Your state attorney general handles consumer protection and fraud more broadly, including matters outside financial regulation.
The Federal Trade Commission collects reports of fraud and impersonation, which feeds investigative work even when individual cases are not pursued.
If personal identifying information was submitted to a company that turned out not to exist, treat that as an identity exposure rather than a lending problem: the federal identity-theft resources exist for exactly that situation and moving quickly matters more than establishing who was at fault.