Texas Payday Lenders Charged $1.35 Billion in Fees the State Can't Cap

Texas does not let most consumer lenders charge more than a low double-digit rate.▸ Payday and auto-title lenders get around that by not registering as lenders at all: under Finance Code Chapter 393, they license as "credit access businesses" (CABs) — brokers who arrange a loan from an outside lender and charge the borrower a separate fee for the service. The underlying loan can stay under the constitutional interest cap; the CAB fee, which is where nearly all the money actually goes, is not subject to any statewide limit. The Texas Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner (OCCC), the agency that licenses CABs, collects exhaustive data on what they charge. It has no legal power to act on any of it.

Texas CABs report their activity to the OCCC every year, broken into four loan types: single-payment and installment payday loans, and single-payment and installment auto-title loans.▸ In calendar year 2025, the four categories combined took in $1.93 billion in fees. Payday loans alone — the two "deferred presentment" categories — accounted for $1.35 billion of that, almost entirely from installment payday loans, which drove $1.32 billion in fees on their own.

Line those installment payday fees up against what CABs actually lent and the arithmetic gets stark.▸ The OCCC's own report shows installment payday CABs extending $909.0 million in new credit and refinancing $207.4 million more in 2025 — $1.12 billion moved through that category alone. Add the smaller single-payment payday category (new extensions of $73.5 million, refinances of $63.9 million) and the statewide payday total is $1.25 billion in credit extended against $1.35 billion in fees charged: $1.08 in fees for every dollar borrowed or refinanced — up from 98 cents the year before. That is not an interest rate on the loan. It is the price of the loan, and no state agency sets a ceiling on it.

Texas's own data undercounts the churn.▸ The OCCC only tracks formal refinances — a borrower explicitly rolling the same contract forward. By that narrow measure, just 6.5% of installment payday loans closed in 2025 had been refinanced even once before payoff.

But "refinance" is a technical term that misses how most borrowers actually reborrow: taking out a new loan shortly after paying off the last one, rather than formally rolling the same contract.▸ The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's landmark 2014 study of storefront payday lending — still the most detailed loan-level analysis of the practice available — found that over 80% of payday loans nationally are rolled over or followed by another loan within 14 days, and that the majority of loan sequences run far longer than a single pay period. Texas's own installment-payday figures are consistent with that pattern at a coarser level: of the loans that closed in 2025, 65,646 had been refinanced at least once, and 2,577 of those had been refinanced seven times or more — a tail of repeat borrowers who never quite pay the original loan off. A national update from the Center for Responsible Lending, compiling 2022 state-regulator data, put Texas at $1.3 billion in payday fees that year alone — already the largest single-state total in the country, and consistent with the OCCC's own 2025 number three years later.

All Texas figures cover calendar year 2025 as reported by CABs to the OCCC as of its April 24, 2026 publication date and are subject to later correction by the agency; the "fees per dollar borrowed" figure is this publication's own calculation from the OCCC's Items 3, 9, and 10, not a number the OCCC itself publishes. The 2024 comparison figures ($1.34 billion in fees, 98 cents per dollar borrowed) are drawn from the OCCC's CY 2024 CAB Annual Data Report (published Nov. 6, 2025). The 80% reborrowing figure is a national estimate from CFPB loan-level data and is not specific to Texas.