In the Fed’s 2025 survey, 16.5% of adults said they used a "Buy Now, Pay Later" service in the past year, up from 12.1% in 2022. Among the people who used one, 25.8% said they had been late making a payment in the past year, up from 17.1% in 2022.
These are our calculations from the Fed’s public survey files, using the survey weight. They are not figures from the Fed’s written reports. The 2025 file has 12,934 adults, and 2,004 of them said they had used a buy now, pay later service.
Did the questions stay the same?
Yes. We checked the Fed’s codebooks for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The two questions read the same in each year: "In the past year, have you used a Buy Now Pay Later service to buy something?" and "In the past year, have you ever been late making a payment for something you bought using a Buy Now Pay Later service?" The only difference we found is a comma after "Buy Now" in the 2025 wording. The late-payment question was asked only of people who said yes to the first one.
Survey estimates have sampling error, and the public file does not give us a margin for each figure. A change of a point or two from one year to the next may be within that error. The change from 2022 to 2025 is larger than that for both measures.
| Survey year | Adults who used BNPL in the past year | BNPL users in the file | Users who were late at least once |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 12.1% | 1,279 | 17.1% |
| 2023 | 13.6% | 1,455 | 18.4% |
| 2024 | 14.7% | 1,670 | 23.6% |
| 2025 | 16.5% | 2,004 | 25.8% |
"Late" is the person’s own answer to the question above. It does not say how late, or whether a fee was charged. The file has a separate question about fees, which this page does not use.
Source
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, public use files for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (variables BNPL1 and BNPL3, weight variable weight), and the matching codebooks. U.S. government data. We pulled the files on October 11, 2026. Our calculations are available under CC BY 4.0. Credit "My Credit Guide (mycreditguide.org)".
Steven Reynolds, "Buy Now, Pay Later Use and Late Payments in the Fed's Household Survey," My Credit Guide, October 11, 2026, https://mycreditguide.org/data/buy-now-pay-later-use/.
If you carry a balance, the payoff calculator and the snowball and avalanche calculator show what a plan costs. For the same survey’s cash-emergency question, see the $400 emergency page.