Guybrielle Madison keeps a stockpile of crunchy snacks hanging from the door inside her pantry turned home office, where she works remotely as a debt collector at United Collection Bureau, a family-owned company with headquarters in Toledo, Ohio. She prefers crackers, pretzels and cheese puffs. The louder the crunch, the better.
Whenever shouting begins to filter through her headset, she mutes her microphone, opens a bag and starts crunching to drown out the noise.
“If they’re cussing at me and I’m eating, I only hear myself chewing,” said Ms. Madison, a 31-year-old single mother who lives in Memphis.
Once, a man began shouting at her after she asked him to verify his identity. He called her a racial slur, she recalled, and said he was going to search for her online. Ms. Madison, who is Black, said she was regularly called racial slurs while doing her job.
Ms. Madison is one of roughly 167,000 debt collectors working in the United States today — a work force that occupies one of the most reviled positions in the American economy. In May, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that 13.1 percent of credit-card balances were at least 90 days delinquent during the first quarter of 2026, the highest rate in 15 years. Credit card debt is sent to collection agencies after 90 to 180 days of missed payments. That’s when the calls begin.
Some debtors have turned to credit-counseling agencies or cut back on spending. Some ignore the calls. Others turn their rage on the person behind the phone. For debt collectors like Ms. Madison, this is just part of a job that offers what many workers with limited options need: steady schedules, remote work and no college degree requirement — at an average hourly wage of $22 an hour, with the chance of earning bonus checks for reaching goals at some collection agencies.
Debt collectors operate under some of the strictest regulations in consumer finance. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act prohibits them from being deceptive, abusive or unfair to debtors, and they must proceed cautiously when raising their voices or terminating calls. They must verify identities before discussing debts, a requirement that often enrages the people they call. They often experience a daily torrent of verbal abuse, threats of violence and the legal obligation to absorb it all without fighting back.
Debt collectors say that few people ever see them as humans who also struggle to pay their own bills, need health insurance and have children to feed.
Ms. Madison earned a bachelor’s degree in forensic science from Miles College in Alabama, but the long, inflexible hours of the field proved incompatible with single motherhood. She wanted steady work that would allow her to be present in her son’s life, so she became a debt collector.
She wakes up each morning, logs into her account, puts on her headset and makes hundreds of calls throughout the day. Of those calls, she usually speaks to about 50 people, many of whom abuse her, she said.
Ms. Madison has worked as a debt collector for six years at four collection agencies. At American Car Center, a dealership where she first worked in the collections division, the only thing separating her from the customers behind on their vehicle payments was her small desk.
About a year into that job, she recalled, a man whose car had been repossessed showed up to her office with a gun. She and three other women she worked with ran to hide in a back room. She heard a gunshot. Minutes later, the man was arrested. A security guard had been shot in his leg.
“The police was already pulling in because we could hear sirens,” Ms. Madison said. “He just ran straight past us to try to run from the cops.”
After the shooting, the company replaced the desks with brick dividers topped with bulletproof glass. Employees worked from home until the new barriers were installed.
That was the extent of the company’s response. No counseling. No crisis management support. Just the glass, and the expectation that they would return to work as soon as possible, Ms. Madison said. In 2023, American Car Center filed for bankruptcy and closed its locations.
A Voice at the End of the Line
Daran Ransom was also working in collections at American Car Center when the company shut down suddenly.
“I was at work, and I was taking care of my mom,” said Mr. Ransom, 46, who lives in Covington, Tenn. “And I got a call, and they was like: ‘Hey, just pack up. It’s over.’”
Mr. Ransom was introduced to debt collections by a cousin. He had been pursuing a degree in music education from the University of Tennessee at Martin, but dropped out one year from graduating to take care of his mother, whose health had declined.
After he lost his job at American Car Center and before his mother died, he received a job offer at United Collection Bureau. He began training only two days after her funeral.
“It was just like, you have to go to work because you have a mortgage,” Mr. Ransom said. “I didn’t want to lose the house that we grew up in.”
Mr. Ransom, who is Black, believes that in addition to race, his gender makes him a target. “I feel like because I’m a male, people are just way harsher,” he said. “It’s a very hard job — I hate it.”
Like Ms. Madison, Mr. Ransom said he had been called a racial slur. He has been told to go kill himself, to go find a real job.
When the calls get bad, Mr. Ransom puts the caller on hold to give himself a few seconds of reprieve.
“So they can have a second to decompress,” he said, “and I can have my second to cool out.”
To the people he calls, Mr. Ransom said, he isn’t a man who dropped out of college to care for his ailing mother, who buried her and went back to work two days later — he’s just a voice on the other end of the line asking for money. Debt collectors, he added, have their own financial burdens.
“We’re bill collectors that probably are being called by other bill collectors, because we’re not making enough money to live and to pay our bills,” he said.
‘It Takes a Toll’
There is limited research on the lived experiences of debt collectors. A 2015 doctoral dissertation from Walden University found that it was “the expectation of the job to endure abuse from customers.”
Irvin Schonfeld, professor emeritus at the City College of New York, who researches occupational stress and work-related burnout, said that while debt collectors specifically hadn’t been widely studied, there was a parallel to workplace bullying. Similar to a bullied employee who cannot retaliate against a manager without consequences, a debt collector is legally prohibited from raising his or her voice, hanging up or responding to verbal abuse in kind. The result is the same power imbalance that researchers have long documented as psychologically damaging in workplaces.
“It takes a toll,” Dr. Schonfeld said. “It leads to elevations in depressive and anxiety symptoms.”
Unlike other professionals, such as police officers or social workers, who have colleagues, supervisors and counselors trained to help them process traumatic interactions, debt collectors largely absorb that toll alone.
“The average bill collector will be doing this job for about five years,” said Scott Post, director of operations at United Collection Bureau, who has been in the industry for 20 years.
Mr. Post has seen the effects of abusive callers on employees. One new staff member came to him early on and disclosed that he had anxiety.
“I was like, you might want to be careful, because this job is not going to be anything that eases anxiety,” Mr. Post said. The employee lasted only a few weeks.
He said that the company had once provided mental health resources to employees, but that it had been cut because few of them used it. “Nobody has ever admitted any mental struggles to me outside of brand-new people,” he said. “They’re too proud.”
Mr. Post was promoted to a management position shortly after he started at UCB, but his role still involves helping collectors through calls and handling some of the more difficult debtors himself. He believes he has survived by having a wife who keeps him grounded, knowing when to walk away from the phone — and using a punching bag on his back porch.
Before landing at United Collection Bureau, Mr. Post spent years on car dealership floors in sales before working his way up to finance director.
“Debt collectors are about as popular as used car salesmen,” he said.
Mr. Post wants to help debtors realize they shouldn’t feel shame.
“I can pick up that person that thinks they’re a deadbeat because they’re in collections and tell them it’s OK,” he said. “Nobody asks for medical debt. It does not make you a bad person.”
