What the release said
Total consumer credit outstanding rose at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.2 percent in July 2026, the Federal Reserve reported in its G.19 release published September 8. Revolving credit — mostly credit cards — grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate, while nonrevolving credit, which includes auto and personal loans and federal student loans, grew faster, at 4.8 percent. Total consumer credit outstanding reached $5,168.1 billion in June and continued climbing into July, with the release's underlying tables showing month-over-month total growth of 3.4 percent in June and 4.2 percent in July, both notably faster than the 0.5 percent pace recorded in May.
On a quarterly basis, the second quarter of 2026 grew at a 2.9 percent annual rate, up from 2.6 percent in the first quarter, itself faster than the 2.2 percent recorded for full-year 2025 — indicating consumer borrowing has been accelerating through 2026 rather than holding steady.
What is missing from the picture
The G.19 release explicitly excludes loans secured by real estate — meaning first mortgages, home equity lines of credit and home equity loans are not part of these figures, regardless of how a borrower uses the proceeds. That exclusion is deliberate: the Federal Reserve tracks real-estate-secured debt separately, through its household debt service ratio series and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Household Debt and Credit report, because mortgage debt behaves differently from unsecured or vehicle-secured consumer debt in terms of collateral, typical maturity and default dynamics.
Even excluded from the headline number, rising consumer credit still bears directly on mortgage underwriting, because most mortgage qualification depends on a borrower's debt-to-income ratio, which counts monthly payments on revolving and nonrevolving consumer debt alongside the proposed mortgage payment. A borrower carrying more credit-card and auto-loan debt has less room, at a given income, to qualify for a given mortgage amount — so accelerating consumer credit growth can tighten effective mortgage affordability even when mortgage rates and home prices hold still.
The cost of carrying that debt
The G.19 release also reported the average interest rate on credit card accounts assessed interest at 22.15 percent, up from 21.52 percent in the prior comparable period, while the average rate on 24-month personal loans was 11.86 percent. Those levels mean that a household adding balances at the July pace is doing so at borrowing costs well above the mortgage rates most homeowners are locked into, which is one reason economists watch nonrevolving and revolving credit growth as an early signal of household financial stress rather than treating it purely as a sign of consumer confidence.
Because the G.19 report is not seasonally adjusted at the same granularity as some other Fed series and revises historical figures with each release, the Fed cautions against reading a single month's acceleration as a definitive trend; the report notes the June and July figures carry a preliminary designation subject to revision in the following month's data.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's separate Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, released in August and covering the second quarter, offers the housing-inclusive counterpart to the G.19 figures: total household debt fell $13 billion, or 0.1 percent, from the first quarter to $18.8 trillion, with mortgage balances on credit reports down $74 billion — a decline the New York Fed attributed mostly to a servicer-transfer reporting gap rather than actual paydown — while HELOC balances rose $13 billion, their 17th consecutive quarterly increase, to $459 billion. Non-housing balances, the same categories the G.19 release tracks, grew $48 billion, or 0.9 percent, in the quarter, with auto loans up $28 billion and credit-card balances up $21 billion — a slower pace than the G.19's July annualized reading but confirming the same underlying direction of accelerating non-mortgage borrowing.