U.S. Household Debt: A Rising Tide

According to the New York Fed’s latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, total household debt in the United States was virtually unchanged in the second quarter of 2026, decreasing by $13 billion – or less than 0.1 percent – to remain at $18.8 trillion. The decline – if we want to call it that – was the first since Q2 2020, when Covid lockdowns had resulted in a $76-billion drop in credit card debt, and a rare interuption in the near-constant rise of U.S. consumer debt balances.

Despite the high level of debt, overall delinquency rates remain relatively low, though slightly elevated compared to the historic lows seen during the pandemic, when consumers were flush with cash from Covid stimulus checks. Looking at total consumer debt, 95.3 percent of the total balance was current (i.e. all payments made on time or less than 30 days late) at the end of Q2 2026, up from less than 90 percent in the midst of the financial crisis and from an average of 93.2 percent between 2010 and 2019.

Looking back to pre-pandemic debt levels, household debt grew $4.6 trillion or 33 percent since the end of 2019, mainly driven by a $3.6-trillion increase in mortgage debt. In 2020 and 2021, many households took advantage of historically low rates to refinance their mortgage and even take out some cash in the process. According to the New York Fed, 14 million mortgages were refinanced during the pandemic refinancing boom, during which home owners extracted $430 billion through cash-out refinances. As a result, mortgages account for 77 percent of the increase in total household debt since Q4 2019, followed by auto loans and credit card debt, which account for 8 and 7 percent of the total increase, respectively.