Auto Debt Is Bigger Than Student Debt, and Repossessions Are at a 15-Year High

Two records arrived in the same auto loan market at once.▸ The debt is the largest it has ever been. So is the share of borrowers who lose the car. Neither number is a forecast — both are counts of things that already happened, reported by two organizations that have no reason to agree with each other: a regional Federal Reserve bank tracking credit-report data, and the finance company that runs the auction lots where repossessed cars are resold.

Every quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Center for Microeconomic Data draws an anonymized sample of Equifax credit reports and totals up what the country owes.▸ In the first quarter of 2026, auto loan balances grew by $18 billion to $1.69 trillion — edging out the country's $1.66 trillion in outstanding student debt, and well ahead of the $1.25 trillion carried on credit cards.

That ranking has held for at least the last two quarters — auto also edged past student debt at the end of 2025 — but it's a reversal of the last decade's storyline, when student debt was the number analysts watched.▸ The car is now the more expensive thing Americans finance on credit after the house.

Bigger balances alone don't make a crisis; what makes one is how often those loans fail.▸ Here the two sources split in a useful way. The Fed's data shows the debt. Cox Automotive, the auction and data company that resells repossessed vehicles and whose estimates the CFPB itself cites as the standard industry benchmark, tracks what happens to the people behind it — jointly with Experian, using loan performance and Manheim auction data.

In 2024, the most recent year in the published series, lenders repossessed an estimated 1.73 million vehicles — 2.3% of the entire loan base, and more repossessions than in any year since 2009, when 1.77 million cars were taken back at the bottom of the financial crisis.▸ The climb wasn't steady: repossessions fell to a low of 1.2 million in 2021 and 2022, as pandemic-era payment accommodations propped borrowers up, then rose 44% in two years as those accommodations expired and car prices — and loan terms — stretched further than they had before.

The mechanics rarely make the headlines the totals do.▸ The CFPB's Repossession in Auto Finance report, drawn from a pilot data-sharing order covering nine major lenders' accounts from 2018 through 2022, is the fullest public look at what happens after a borrower falls behind. As of December 2022 — the last month in that dataset — lenders had assigned 0.75% of all outstanding loans to a third party for repossession, up 22.5% from the December 2019 share. Of accounts assigned to repossession, only about 27% were actually completed within the following months; the rest were cured, cancelled, or otherwise resolved before the car changed hands. Even after a vehicle is taken, roughly 30% of borrowers redeem it by paying what's owed. For the majority who don't, the CFPB found an average deficiency balance — what the borrower still owes after the car is repossessed and resold — of $11,340 as of December 2022, a figure that had climbed back above 2019 levels as post-pandemic used-car prices cooled.

Debt and repossession figures come from three organizations that measure the market independently — the New York Fed (credit-report balances), Cox Automotive/Experian (repossession volume), and the CFPB (a 2018–2022 pilot dataset on repossession mechanics) — so exact definitions and coverage years differ slightly across the figures cited above.