Auto loan balances in the United States reached $1.713 trillion at the end of June, the highest figure recorded in a series the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has published since 2003. The quarterly increase was $28 billion. It landed in a quarter when total household debt went down, which is what makes the car loan the outlier in the report.
The one balance that grew while total household debt shrank
The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data released its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit on August 11, covering the second quarter of 2026. Total household debt decreased by $13 billion, a 0.1 percent decline, to $18.8 trillion. Nearly every large category moved with that tide or close to it.
Mortgage balances fell by $74 billion to $13.117 trillion. Student loan balances fell by $7 billion to $1.651 trillion. Credit cards rose by $21 billion to $1.263 trillion, and auto debt rose by $28 billion to $1.713 trillion, according to the New York Fed’s release on the quarter. Measured over a full year rather than a quarter, auto balances are up $58 billion. Cars were the largest single-quarter dollar increase of any consumer category in a report whose headline number was a decrease.
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A series high that begins in 2003, before any inflation adjustment
The quarterly data behind the report, published alongside it on the Household Debt and Credit page, runs from the first quarter of 2003 to the present. Auto debt stood at $641 billion at the start of that record. The $1.713 trillion posted for the second quarter of 2026 is the highest reading in all ninety-four quarters, ahead of $1.685 trillion in the first quarter of this year and $1.667 trillion at the end of 2025.
Two qualifications belong with that record, and they are the reason the figure should not be read as a crisis on its own. The series is nominal, so it is not adjusted for inflation or for the growth of the population that borrows. And an aggregate can rise because more people are financing vehicles, because each financed vehicle costs more, or because loans are being repaid more slowly. The report itself does not separate those causes.
New auto delinquencies moved from 2.93 to 3.00 percent
The delinquency picture in the report is mixed rather than alarming, and the auto line is the part that has not improved. The flow into serious delinquency for auto debt, meaning the share of balances newly becoming 90 or more days past due, ran at an annualized 3.00 percent in the second quarter of 2026 against 2.93 percent a year earlier. Across all debt categories together the comparable rate fell, from 2.91 percent to 2.57 percent.
Aggregate delinquency rates actually improved slightly in the quarter, with 4.7 percent of outstanding debt in some stage of delinquency, but transitions into early delinquency rose for auto loans and mortgages. Joelle Scally, an economic policy advisor at the New York Fed, said in the release that delinquency rates across most products have held steady for two years, and added that new delinquencies for auto loans and credit cards remain at elevated levels.
One caution about the wider delinquency numbers is worth carrying. A companion analysis on the bank’s Liberty Street Economics blog explains that the total stock of 90-day-plus credit card delinquency has been inflated by charged-off balances that lenders now report to credit bureaus for far longer than they used to. Between 2004 and 2012 about 40 percent of charged-off debts were still being reported a year later; by 2024 that share had doubled to 80 percent. The flow of new delinquencies is the cleaner read on current distress, which is why the auto figure of 3.00 percent carries more information than any headline stock number.
Why $1.713 trillion cannot be divided into a car payment
The report is built from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel, a nationally representative sample drawn from anonymized Equifax credit records. It publishes aggregates. It does not publish an average auto loan balance per household, and dividing the national total by any household count produces a number the Federal Reserve has not endorsed and would not stand behind, because the denominator includes tens of millions of households with no car loan at all.
What the report does give a car-owning household is direction rather than a personal figure: the total is at a series high, the quarterly growth is the largest of any consumer category, and new serious delinquencies on that exact type of debt are running higher than a year ago while most other categories improve.
The rates and loan sizes behind $211 billion in new lending
The quarter also saw a pickup in new borrowing, with $211 billion in auto loan originations. For the terms attached to that lending, the relevant federal source is a different one: the Federal Reserve Board’s G.19 consumer credit release, published August 7, which surveys the actual terms of credit rather than balances.
In that G.19 release, the average interest rate on a 60-month new car loan at commercial banks was 7.14 percent in the second quarter of 2026, down from 7.53 percent in the first quarter and from an 8.16 percent average across 2024. Finance companies, the lenders most often used at a dealership, reported an average rate of 6.1 percent on new car loans in the first quarter of 2026, the most recent quarter for which the Fed publishes that series, on an average amount financed of $42,504 stretched over an average maturity of 66 months. That $42,504 was $35,307 in 2021. The aggregate at the top of this report and the loan on one household’s kitchen table are moving in the same direction, and the Fed measures them separately for a reason.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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