Guybrielle Madison keeps a stash 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 headquartered in Toledo, Ohio. She prefers biscuits, pretzels and cheese puffs. The higher the crunch, the better.
Whenever yelling starts to filter through her headset, she mutes the microphone, opens a bag and starts crunching to drown out the noise.
“If they’re yelling at me and I’m eating, all I hear is myself chewing,” said Madison, a 31-year-old single mother who lives in Memphis.
Once, a man started yelling at her after she asked him to confirm her identity. He called her a racial slur, she recalled, and said he would look her up online. Madison, who is black, said she was regularly called racial slurs while doing her job.
Madison is one of about 167,000 debt collectors working in the United States today — a workforce that occupies one of the most maligned 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 in 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 missing payments. That’s when the calls begin.
Some debtors have turned to credit counseling agencies or cut back on expenses. Some ignore the calls. Others turn their fury 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: regular schedules, telecommuting and no college education requirements — at an average hourly wage of $22 an hour, with the opportunity to earn 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 misleading, abusive or unfair to debtors, and they must tread carefully when raising their voice or ending calls. They must verify identities before discussing debt, a requirement that often infuriates the people they call. They often experience a daily stream of verbal abuse, threats of violence and the legal obligation to absorb it all without fighting back.
Debt collectors say few people ever see them as people who also struggle to pay their own bills, need health insurance and have children to feed.
Madison earned a bachelor’s degree in forensics from Miles College in Alabama, but the long, inflexible hours in the field proved incompatible with single motherhood. She wanted a steady job that would allow her to be present in her son’s life, so she became a debt collector.
She wakes up every morning, logs into her account, puts on her headset and makes hundreds of calls throughout the day. Of those calls, she usually talks to about 50 people, many of whom abuse her, she said.
Madison has worked as a debt collector for six years at four debt collection agencies. At American Car Center, a dealership where she first worked in the collections department, the only thing that separated her from the customers behind their car payments was her small desk.
About a year into that job, she recalled, a man whose car had been repossessed showed up at her office with a gun. She and three other women she worked with ran to hide in a back room. She heard a shot. A few minutes later, the man was arrested. A security guard had been shot in his leg.
“The police already moved in because we could hear sirens,” Madison said. “He ran straight past us to try and run from the police.”
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 advice. No crisis management support. Just the glass and the expectation that they would get back to work as soon as possible, 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 business suddenly shut down.
“I was at work and I was taking care of my mother,” said Mr. Ransom, 46, who lives in Covington, Tenn. “And I got a call and they said, ‘Hey, just pack up. It’s over.'”
Mr. Ransom was introduced to debt collection by a cousin. He had pursued a degree in music education from the University of Tennessee at Martin, but dropped out a year from graduation to care for his mother, whose health had declined.
After he lost his job at the American Car Center and before his mother died, he received a job offer at the United Collection Bureau. He started training just two days after her funeral.
“It was like you have to go to work because you have a mortgage,” Mr. Ransom. “I didn’t want to lose the house we grew up in.”
Mr. Ransom, who is black, believes that beyond race, his gender makes him a target. “I feel like because I’m a man, people are just a lot tougher,” he said. “It’s a very hard job – I hate it.”
Like Ms. Madison said Mr. Ransom that he had been called a racist slur. He has been asked to kill himself in order to find a real job.
When the calls go bad, Mr. Ransom the caller on hold to give yourself a few seconds reprieve.
“So they can have a second to decompress,” he said, “and I can have my second cool down.”
To the people he calls, Mr. Ransom that he’s not a man who dropped out of college to take care of his sick mother, 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 are bill collectors who probably get called by other bill collectors because we don’t make enough money to live and pay our bills,” he said.
‘It takes a toll’
There is limited research into the lived experiences of debt collectors. A 2015 Walden University doctoral dissertation found that it was “the expectation of the job to endure abuse from customers.”
Irvin Schonfeld, a professor emeritus at the City College of New York who researches work-related stress and work-related burnout, said that while debt collection companies specifically had not 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 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,” said Dr. Schonfeld. “It leads to increases 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 this toll on their own.
“The average bill collector will do this job for about five years,” said Scott Post, director of operations at United Collection Bureau, who has been in the business for 20 years.
Mr. Post has seen the effects of abusive callers on employees. A new employee came to him early and revealed that he had anxiety.
“I was like, you might want to be careful because this job is not going to be something that eases anxiety,” Mr. Mail. The employee only lasted a few weeks.
He said the company had once made mental health resources available to employees, but they had been cut because few of them used them. “No one has ever admitted any mental struggles to me outside of brand new people,” he said. “They are too proud.”
Mr. Post was promoted to a management position shortly after starting at UCB, but his role still involves helping collectors through calls and handling some of the more difficult debtors himself. He believes he’s survived by having a wife who keeps him grounded, knows when to get off the phone — and by using a punching bag on his front porch.
Before landing at the United Collection Bureau, Mr. Post years on car dealership floors in sales before working his way up to CFO.
“Dealers are about as popular as used car salesmen,” he said.
Mr. Post wants to help debtors realize that they should not feel shame.
“I can pick up on the person who thinks they’re a deadbeat because they’re in collections and tell them it’s OK,” he said. “Nobody asks for medical debt. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
