Subaru Outback Complaints and Recalls by Year

Outback is kept apart from Legacy. Open a year-page for recalls and owner filings.

NHTSA complaint counts are self-selected reports. They are not normalised for sales volume and they are not a reliability score. YearTell does not publish stars, “best year” lists or advice to avoid a vehicle.

This guide reports NHTSA owner-complaint and recall counts for the Subaru Outback from the 2026-09-07 snapshot. 9,543 owner reports are on file across 29 published model years (1996–2025). 2019 has the highest complaint count (1,031).

Older model years have had longer to accumulate reports, so a high lifetime total is not evidence that a year is worse to own. YearTell does not adjust these figures for how many vehicles were sold.

Where a system dominates the file, it is named below as a count, not as a diagnosis. Open the year-page for the component table, the recall list and a short set of owner narratives.

Years that appear most often in NHTSA complaints

Recall campaigns are manufacturer safety actions filed with NHTSA. A year can have many complaints and few recalls, or the reverse. The two series answer different questions.

If you are comparing two adjacent years, use the equal-exposure comparison when one exists. That window holds age constant so the later year is not punished for having had less time on the road.

A practical read: open the year you are shopping, note the system named most often, read every recall campaign, then skim the owner filings for that system. Take that list to a mechanic. Do not turn the complaint total into a score.

Model-year records cited

• 2019 Subaru Outback
• 2017 Subaru Outback
• 2020 Subaru Outback
• 2018 Subaru Outback
• 2011 Subaru Outback
• 2016 Subaru Outback
• 2015 Subaru Outback
• 2022 Subaru Outback
• Subaru Outback

How YearTell builds these numbers

Counts are not a reliability score.