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FinObservatory

Consumer credit / Methodology

Consumer Credit Methodology

How the /consumer-credit module is built, what it covers, and where it stops. It is the credit-volumes-and-delinquencies view of US consumer credit, distinct from the two neighbouring surfaces it deliberately does not duplicate.

What this module covers, and what it does not

  • This page: the Federal Reserve Board's monthly G.19 Consumer Credit release (dollar volumes outstanding and terms of credit) and the Board's quarterly Charge-Off and Delinquency Rates on Loans and Leases at Commercial Banks release. Consumer credit here is the G.19 definition: credit extended to individuals for household, family, and other personal expenditures, excluding loans secured by real estate. It splits into revolving (mostly credit cards) and nonrevolving (auto, student, and other closed-end loans).
  • Not this page, cross-linked instead:
    • /consumer is the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database: counts of complaints, not dollars of credit. A different question about the same households.
    • /conditions carries the NY Fed Household Debt and Credit report, built from the Consumer Credit Panel (an anonymized 5% sample of Equifax credit files): total household debt by product and the share of balances 90+ days delinquent. That panel includes mortgages and student loans and measures delinquency as a share of balances. This page instead measures delinquency as the commercial-bank call-report rate, and measures volume as the G.19 aggregate. The two are complementary reads, not the same series.

Data

Source key g19. Retrieved from the FRED API (scripts/fetch_g19.py -> scripts/build_g19.py -> data/parquet/consumer_credit.parquet, long format: series_id, date, value; 3,944 rows across 11 series). observation_start=1776-01-01 on every series so nothing is silently truncated. FRED's "." missing marker is dropped, never coerced to zero. Full series notes are stored verbatim in data/raw/g19/raw_json/<ID>.meta.json; the retrieval details and the complete series table are in data/raw/g19/SOURCE.md.

Series

G.19 volumes (monthly, seasonally adjusted). TOTALSL total, REVOLSL revolving, NONREVSL nonrevolving. FRED serves these in millions of dollars; the published G.19 release quotes billions, so this module divides by 1,000. The Fed defines total as the sum of its parts, so the identity TOTALSL == REVOLSL + NONREVSL must hold; the build asserts it on every month where all three print (701 common months, maximum residual 0.01 million, rounding only).

G.19 terms of credit (quarterly prints, not seasonally adjusted, percent). TERMCBAUTO48NS new-car 48-month finance rate at commercial banks (from 1972), TERMCBCCALLNS credit-card APR across all accounts (from 1994), and TERMCBCCINTNS credit-card APR across accounts assessed interest. FRED labels these monthly, but the G.19 terms table is quarterly, so the series print only in the middle month of each quarter.

Charge-Off and Delinquency Rates (quarterly, seasonally adjusted, percent). DRCCLACBS credit-card delinquency (from 1991), DRCLACBS consumer-loan delinquency (from 1987), DRSFRMACBS single-family residential mortgage delinquency (from 1991), DRALACBS all-loans delinquency as a benchmark (from 1985), and CORCCACBS credit-card charge-off (from 1985). A loan is delinquent when past due 30 days or more and still accruing, plus nonaccrual loans; charge-offs are the value removed from the books as a loss, net of recoveries, annualized. Both are measured against all commercial banks.

Every number is computed at build

The page carries no raw SQL and no typed statistic. Each headline is returned by a function in src/lib/consumerCredit.ts from fixed SQL over the parquet, so a data refresh moves the text automatically and nothing can drift out of date by hand.

Two anchors verified verbatim against the Fed releases

Checked on 2026-07-19 against the live releases and printed as receipts by the build script:

  1. Total consumer credit outstanding. The G.19 release for May 2026 (released July 8, 2026) reports total consumer credit outstanding, seasonally adjusted, at $5,154.5 billion (revolving $1,344.2 billion, nonrevolving $3,810.3 billion). TOTALSL for May 2026 is $5,154,538.86 million, which is $5,154.5 billion, an exact match.
  2. Credit-card delinquency rate. The Charge-Off and Delinquency release for 2026:Q1 reports the credit-card delinquency rate at all commercial banks at 2.92% (DRCCLACBS), with consumer loans at 2.64% and single-family mortgages at 1.89%. These were read directly from the Fed release table; a naive scrape of the wide multi-column table lands on the wrong column and returns 1.34%, so the figure was confirmed column by column.

Definitions

  • Revolving share is revolving credit divided by total consumer credit.
  • Year-on-year change compares the latest total to the same month twelve months earlier, both seasonally adjusted.
  • Record for the credit-card delinquency rate is the maximum over its full 1991-present history.

Limitations

  • The G.19 consumer-credit aggregate excludes real-estate-secured debt, so it is smaller than total household debt; the mortgage story lives on /conditions and /mortgage.
  • The delinquency and charge-off rates are commercial-bank call-report measures, so they exclude credit unions, finance companies, and securitized pools held outside banks; the NY Fed panel on /conditions covers a broader lender set through Equifax.
  • The terms-of-credit rates are quarterly and not seasonally adjusted.
  • Seasonally adjusted levels are revised as the Fed updates its adjustment; the page always reflects the latest vintage in the parquet.

License

Every series is a Federal Reserve Board statistical release, a US-government work in the public domain (Board statement: "Unless otherwise indicated, the materials on this website may be reproduced without restriction"). Unlike the ICE BofA and Moody's series behind /corporate-credit, these carry no redistribution restriction, so they are charted and republished directly.