Sam Batkins and Dan Goldbeck of the American Action Forum investigate the six-year impact of Dodd-Frank financial regulations.

Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act six years ago in an attempt to address the causes of the financial crisis. The law has imposed billions of dollars in costs with unclear benefits. Regulators have least 61 regulations remaining to finish implementing the law. According to American Action Forum (AAF) research, Dodd-Frank has imposed more than $36 billion in final rule costs and 73 million paperwork hours, up from $24 billion in final rule costs and 61 million paperwork burden hours from last year’s report. To put those figures in perspective, the costs are approximately $112 per person or $310 per household; for paperwork, it would take 36,950 employees working full-time (2,000 hours annually) to complete a single year of the law’s paperwork, and those are based on agency calculations.

In recent research, AAF even found the law had resulted in a 14.5 percent decline in revolving consumer credit. From a housing market still experiencing mediocre growth, to an uneven labor picture, to significant consumer impacts, it’s clear the law has fundamentally altered capital markets and added layers of complexity for individuals and financial institutions.

The law has imposed tremendous costs, but the height of those impositions might not be in the past. The following chart examines rulemaking costs by year, from July 21, 2010, when Dodd-Frank was passed, to each year since.

DF-Total-Costs

At one point, Year 3 was clearly the high-water mark, but in the last twelve months a quartet of billion-dollar Dodd-Frank measures easily placed Year 6 as the most expensive in the law’s history.