In the Federal Reserve’s 2025 household survey, 21.8% of adults with a credit card said they had carried an unpaid balance most or all of the time in the past 12 months. 55.0% said they never carried a balance and always paid in full. 81.5% of all adults had at least one credit card.
2.9% of cardholders said that in the previous month they did not pay, or paid less than the minimum, on at least one card. The "most or all of the time" share was 23.8% in 2022.
How often cardholders carry a balance, 2022 to 2025
| Survey year | Most or all of the time | Some of the time | Once | Never (always pay in full) | Missed or paid under the minimum last month | Adults with a card |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 23.8% | 18.8% | 5.8% | 51.6% | n.a. | 82.2% |
| 2023 | 23.5% | 18.1% | 5.5% | 52.9% | 3.2% | 81.8% |
| 2024 | 22.5% | 18.1% | 5.4% | 54.0% | 2.8% | 81.4% |
| 2025 | 21.8% | 17.9% | 5.4% | 55.0% | 2.9% | 81.5% |
Shares of adults with at least one credit card, except the last column, which is a share of all adults. The rows do not add to 100% because some cardholders did not answer. The minimum-payment question is not in the 2022 file.
How we calculated this
We used the Fed’s public-use files and survey weights. Cardholders are adults answering Yes to C2A ("Do you currently have at least one credit card?"). The balance columns use C4A ("In the past 12 months, how frequently have you carried an unpaid balance on one or more of your credit cards?") and the minimum-payment column uses C3P ("Last month, how did you handle your credit card bills?"). The wording is from the 2025 codebook. These are our weighted calculations, not figures published by the Fed. They are self-reported, and they count people, unlike the large-bank minimum-payment series, which counts accounts.
Source
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), public-use data files for 2022 to 2025. Federal Reserve data are public domain. Our weighted percentages are available under CC BY 4.0. Credit "My Credit Guide (mycreditguide.org)".
Steven Reynolds, "How Often Cardholders Carry a Balance," My Credit Guide, October 13, 2026, https://mycreditguide.org/data/carrying-a-credit-card-balance/.