The Government Accountability Office reported October 6 that a law restricting the sale of mortgage "trigger leads" took effect in March 2026. GAO says not enough time has passed to tell whether it has cut the marketing calls and texts some homebuyers get after applying for a mortgage — "dozens," in GAO's account, "in a short period."
What a trigger lead is
When a lender requests a homebuyer's credit report, the credit reporting agency may sell information from it — "name, contact information, and credit information," GAO writes — to other lenders and brokers, who use it to pick targets for solicitations. Doing that without the homebuyer's consent is allowed only if certain criteria are met, including that the buyer of the lead will make a firm offer of credit. Until recently, GAO says, the Fair Credit Reporting Act permitted this even for lenders with no existing relationship with the homebuyer.
What the law restricts, and when
The Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act, enacted in 2025 (Pub. L. No. 119-36, 139 Stat. 493, codified at 15 U.S.C. 1681b(c)), amended that act to limit the furnishing of residential mortgage trigger leads to three groups: a lender or broker that originated or is servicing the homebuyer's current residential mortgage; an insured depository institution or credit union at which the homebuyer has a current account; or a party that has given the credit reporting agency documentation certifying it has the homebuyer's authorization. GAO writes that the restrictions "took effect in early March 2026 — 180 days after enactment," and gives no day for either; this record does not supply one. GAO's letter to the congressional committees is dated October 6, 2026, the date its product page lists as both published and publicly released.
What GAO found, and its limits
GAO's estimates come from 2022-2024 responses to the National Survey of Mortgage Originations, funded and managed jointly by the Federal Housing Finance Agency and CFPB. Of homebuyers in that period, GAO estimates at most 3.5 percent "may have obtained a loan through competing offers based on trigger leads" — measured as those who both applied to more than one lender and chose one that had made the first contact. That is the upper bound of a 99 percent confidence interval; the point estimate is 3.0 percent, plus or minus 0.5 percent. At most 31.7 percent applied to more than one lender, and an estimated 45.0 percent seriously considered only one. Using a large language model to search CFPB's complaint data, GAO also identified more than 100 complaints filed from January 1, 2020 through March 5, 2026 that were likely prompted by trigger leads.
What it does not say
The report makes no recommendations, and does not say whether solicitation volume or shopping behavior has changed: "not enough time has passed to assess the effects of the act's new restrictions." Its forward-looking line is conditional — "If effectively implemented, these restrictions could limit access to trigger leads and reduce the volume of solicitations homebuyers receive while preserving opportunities to comparison shop." CFPB had no comments on the report; FTC gave technical comments GAO incorporated.