Depending on their experience, local special education directors may be familiar with the complaint procedures (CP) avenue that the IDEA requires each state education agency (SEA) to provide. Yet most special education professors and many parents of students with disabilities have negligible knowledge about this avenue of decisional dispute resolution under the IDEA, especially compared with the other alternative--the hearing officer (HO) route. One of the reasons for this lack of knowledge is the limited attention to the CP avenue in the special education literature. For example, many of the texts in special education law do not mention, much less explain, the CP process (e.g., Osborne & Russo, 2016; Weber, Mawdsley, & Redfield, 2013), and others accord it tertiary attention in comparison to the HO process (e.g., Guernsey & Clare, 2008; Yell, 2016). The purpose of this article is to provide an empirical analysis of the CP system in comparison to the HO system with regard to the issue categories, outcomes, and remedies in their respective written decisions. The data are from five of the most active states, and the comparison is not only between these two systems for the total sample but also among the five state subsamples.