On August 10, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas granted in part a consumer reporting agency (CRA) trade association’s motion for summary judgment, holding that the FCRA expressly preempts a Texas law that barred CRAs from including certain out-of-network medical debt information in consumer reports. The court found that the Texas statute — which prohibited reporting collection accounts with a medical industry code where the consumer had health coverage and the debt arose from an out-of-network emergency or facility-based provider — was preempted under 15 U.S.C. § 1681t(b)(1)(E) because it impermissibly enacted a prohibition in a subject matter regulated under 15 U.S.C. § 1681c. While the court found the scope of § 1681c’s subject matter ambiguous, it reviewed the legislative history and concluded that Congress’s handling of a sunset provision was decisive: in 2003, lawmakers repealed a provision giving states a future window to enact stronger consumer protections before the provision took effect, choosing permanent national uniformity instead. The court held this sequence demonstrated Congress intended to preempt states from passing legislation more protective of consumers regarding adverse information on consumer reports, including medical debt, and permanently enjoined the state from enforcing the law.

However, the court rejected the trade association’s broadest preemption theory: that § 1681t(b)(1)(E) preempts any state law “relating to information contained in consumer reports” without regard to the specific content of § 1681c. The court also declined to defer to either the CFPB’s July 2022 interpretive rule, which had adopted a narrow reading of preemption, or the CFPB’s October 2025 interpretive rule, which adopted a broad reading, citing the Supreme Court’s holding that courts must exercise independent judgment rather than defer to agency statutory interpretations.