The alarm over U.S. consumer credit is ringing at a familiar pitch — and on a surface level it looks like a replay of the run-up to the 2008 crisis. The New York Fed’s measure of credit-card balances that are 90 days or more past due has surpassed 13%, a level that in the past has signaled widespread consumer distress. But a Wall Street Journal analysis of the numbers published Friday argues that the composition of debt today is fundamentally different, and the real risk may be the opposite of what the delinquency headline suggests.
Total credit-card loan balances in the U.S. stand at roughly $1.3 trillion, a record in nominal terms. Adjusted for inflation, however, the average household holds about $11,500 in card debt — nearly $1,600 less per household than in 2007, according to calculations by the personal-finance site WalletHub cited by the Journal. Broader measures of debt burden also show consumers in better shape: the Federal Reserve’s gauge of debt-service payments as a percentage of disposable personal income was 5.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025, compared with more than 7% two decades earlier.
Other indicators of credit-card stress remain well below crisis-era levels. A separate Fed metric tracking banks’ consumer card loans shows that under 3% of card balances are at least 30 days past due. In 2007 that rate climbed above 4%, and it topped out near 7% a couple of years later.
The divergence between the 90-day-plus measure and the 30-day metric, the Journal’s analysis found, stems partly from what the New York Fed’s delinquency tally includes. That figure captures balances that appear on consumers’ credit reports even after banks have written them off — meaning it reflects an accumulation of old bad loans as much as current payment trouble.
A root cause traces back to the pandemic. Government stimulus payments helped many Americans pay down old debts and boost their credit scores. Originations of new card balances jumped. But as the economy normalized, underlying fragilities among some borrowers re-emerged, leaving a particular “vintage” of pandemic-era credit as a troubled cohort.
“Jobs are stable. But once you lose a job, it can take longer to find a new one,” said Michael Taiano, senior analyst at Moody’s Ratings, in the Journal report. “So some consumers that go delinquent aren’t curing in the typical way.”
The result is a two-tier consumer-credit picture: a segment of borrowers genuinely struggling, set against an overall population that remains fairly healthy by historical measures. The low-fire, low-hire dynamic in the labor market — where employment is steady but re-employment after a job loss is slow — means delinquent accounts are less likely to be brought current through a quick return to work.
Some consumers may also be choosing to carry card debt rather than refinance into a higher-cost mortgage. With pandemic-era home loans locked in at rates around 3% and current mortgage rates above 6%, a cash-out refinance can be far more expensive than simply paying down a card balance over time, the analysis noted.
From the banking sector’s perspective, the bad debts appear manageable. Seasonally adjusted consumer credit-card charge-off rates — balances banks deem uncollectible — stood at about 3.8% in the first quarter of 2026, below the roughly 4.3% average since 1985, according to Fed data. At a time when card loans are yielding higher interest, those losses are easier to absorb.
But the process of working through the troubled debt has led lenders to pull back. Many have tightened criteria for new card approvals and credit-line increases. The result shows up in another Fed indicator: while bank credit-card loan growth sharply outpaced nominal gross domestic product after the pandemic, more recently it has been trailing GDP.
That tightening poses a challenge for banks trying to expand their loan books and for the consumer-driven part of the economy. The risk, the Journal’s analysis concluded, is not that Americans have taken on too much credit — as was the case before 2008 — but that some may not be able to get enough of it, particularly at a time when prices are rising faster than wages and when companies serving middle- and lower-income shoppers depend on consumer spending.