- Household credit stress — the synthesising view: Canada's G7 debt-service burden and the overall financial-stress rate.
- Mortgage delinquencies — the mortgage-specific arrears picture, including the regional and provincial cuts.
- Household debt — the underlying leverage on which repayment stress rests.
Arrears rates are the upstream signal of household-credit distress. A loan counted as 90+ days past due is well down the path toward charge-off or repossession, but the rate itself moves before those terminal events register. Because it moves early, it gauges stress better than any count of repossessions, of which Canada in any case keeps no national tally. The Bank of Canada's product-type series, built on TransUnion's loan-level data, lets us watch three distinct consumer-credit markets move at once. Through the 2024–2026 period they are moving in the same direction: up. The companion Mortgage delinquencies and Household debt metrics cover the secured and aggregate-leverage sides of the same household balance sheet.
Each product type is shown on its own scale so its trajectory reads clearly: the renewed climb in auto loans, the deep pandemic V and full recovery in credit cards, and the accelerating climb in instalment loans. The levels are not comparable across panels (instalment-loan arrears run about three times the auto-loan rate), but the direction is shared: all three end the series at their highest readings.
Why these three move differently. Auto and instalment loans are amortising, secured-or-structured debt with fixed payments; credit cards are revolving and the most sensitive to short-term cash-flow squeezes, which is why their arrears rate swung most sharply through the pandemic. Instalment loans, a category that includes unsecured personal loans and point-of-sale financing, carry the highest arrears rate throughout. The strain is concentrated among lower-buffer borrowers.
Source: Bank of Canada Financial Stability Indicators — Household credit performance (TransUnion & BoC calculations). Each panel is scaled to its own range; the vertical axes are not comparable across panels. Quarterly, 2015-Q4 to 2026-Q2.
Reading the shapes. Auto loans have climbed steadily off their 2021-Q2 trough, and after a one-quarter dip in 2025-Q2 the rate has risen in each of the four quarters since, from 0.71% to 0.87%. Credit cards trace a full cycle: a pre-pandemic drift up to 0.75%, a collapse to 0.44% as payment-deferral programs and stimulus suppressed defaults in 2020–21, then a full recovery to a 0.80% high. Instalment loans show no cycle at all, just a long climb that has steepened since 2023, with no quarterly dip anywhere in that stretch — the last decline in the series was in 2021-Q1.
Instalment-loan arrears have risen from 0.95% in 2015-Q4 to 2.95% in 2026-Q2, 3.1 times the starting level. The climb has steepened since 2023 and has not fallen in a single quarter since 2021-Q1; the 2026-Q2 jump of 0.43pp is the largest quarterly increase anywhere in the series. They run about three times the auto-loan rate throughout the series, ranging from 2.7× to 3.7×.
At 0.87% in 2026-Q2 auto arrears are at their series high, up about 123% from the 0.39% pandemic low of 2021-Q2. After a one-quarter dip in 2025-Q2 the rate has risen in each of the four quarters since: 0.74%, 0.76%, 0.80%, and now 0.87%.
Card arrears fell sharply to a 0.44% trough in 2021-Q1 as deferrals and stimulus suppressed defaults, then recovered fully to a series-high 0.80% by 2026-Q2. The 2019-Q4 → 2020 leg coincides with a reporting shift and is read with mild caution.
Despite different levels and shapes, every product type ends the series at its highest reading. The breadth of the move is what makes the signal load-bearing for the financing pillar: secured auto, revolving cards, and unsecured instalment debt are rising together.
Arrears on auto loans, credit cards, and instalment loans all sit at series highs in 2026-Q2, with instalment loans at 2.95%, 3.1 times their 2015-Q4 level.
- Compared with
- Canada's own series from 2015-Q4, the first quarter the page charts, for 90+ day arrears on auto loans, credit cards, and instalment loans.
- Where Canada sits
- Instalment-loan arrears were 2.95% in 2026-Q2, against 0.95% in 2015-Q4. Auto loans were at 0.87% and credit cards at 0.80%, both series highs.
- Which way it is moving
- Up. Arrears are rising across products, which is a deterioration. The 2026-Q2 jump of 0.43pp in instalment loans is the largest quarterly increase in the series.
- What the verdict follows
- Level against Canada's own 2015-Q4 baseline. Level and direction agree, with every product at its series high in the latest quarter.
- Data basis
- Bank of Canada Financial Stability Indicators, Household credit performance (TransUnion data with Bank of Canada calculations), quarterly 2015-Q4 to 2026-Q2, September 2026 vintage. Page last reviewed September 2026, data current to Q2 2026, the latest published by the Bank of Canada.
Primary sources
- Bank of Canada — Financial Stability Indicators, Household credit performance group. Valet API group ID FVI_HOUSEHOLD_CREDIT_PERFORMANCE. Quarterly arrears rates by product type (auto loans, credit cards, instalment loans).
- Underlying loan-level data sourced from TransUnion, with Bank of Canada calculations. Series labelled by the Bank as "Rates of loans in arrears (%), by product type."
- Bank of Canada — Indicators of Financial Vulnerabilities — companion household debt-service and vulnerability indicators.
Methodology notes
- Definition. Arrears rate = the share of loans in a given product class that are 90+ days past due, expressed as a percentage. This is a loan-level measure (count of loans in arrears ÷ count of loans), not balance-weighted. Reported quarterly.
- Series coverage. The household-credit-performance series begins in 2015-Q1; the data charted here run 2015-Q4 to 2026-Q2 (43 quarterly points per series). The Bank's first three quarters are excluded: the auto and instalment series behave erratically at the start (instalment arrears read 1.70% in 2015-Q1 before settling near 0.95% by 2015-Q4), and we treat those readings as start-of-series artefacts. That is our judgement, not a Bank of Canada designation. No public Canadian auto-arrears series extends meaningfully further back, so "series high" means highest within this window and the data cannot speak to the longer historical record.
- Revisions. The Bank restates this series with each quarterly release and notes that the data "are subject to revisions." Figures on this page are the vintage published in the Bank's September 2026 release (data through 2026-Q2); anyone comparing against an earlier copy of the series should expect small differences.
- Arrears ≠ repossession. Arrears is the upstream signal; repossession is a distinct, later event. Canada keeps no national repossession count, so this series is the best available proxy for downstream loss pressure. It does not measure repossessions.
- Not interchangeable with Equifax delinquency rates. The BoC/TransUnion arrears rate (loan-level, 90+ days) uses a different denominator from Equifax's "delinquency rate," which is often borrower-level or balance-based. The two sources should not be stacked, spliced, or compared as if measuring the same thing.
- Credit-card reporting shift. The 2019-Q4 → 2020 movement in the credit-card series coincides with a reporting change and should be read with mild caution. The auto and instalment series are cleaner through that window.
- Cross-country comparison. No harmonised G7 peer series exists on this exact loan-level, product-type basis, so this metric is presented as a Canada time series rather than an international ranking.
- Companion dataset. Financing_Consumer-Loan-Arrears_Data.xlsx contains all three quarterly series in editable form, with source notes.
