Report
Q2 2025 Credit Industry Insights
Canadian Credit Market Shows Signs of Recovery as New Mortgages Rise 51% Year-Over-Year
Q2 2025 Report highlights include:
- Inflation continues to be a key driver of the growth in consumer balances over the last three years, with average non-mortgage balances rising 10% since 2022
- Home affordability remains a challenge as average new mortgage sizes climbed 6.9% year-over-year, driven by renewed housing demand
- Regional disparities in cost of living and wage growth contributed to varying delinquency trends across Canadian provinces; Alberta saw the highest level of serious delinquency (90+ days past due), rising 11 basis points to 2.29%
New data from TransUnion shows that total Canadian consumer credit balances reached $2.52 trillion in Q2 2025, up 4.4% year-over-year (YoY). That marks a 15% increase since Q1 2022, which aligns with the onset of rising in inflation rates in Canada. Once inflation is factored in, however, the actual increase was just 3% (or $0.08 trillion), meaning that while debt levels are have climbed, the actual real growth in what Canadians owe was more modest than it appears.
90+ Day Delinquency Rate YoY Changes for All Product Loans*
*Measured in basis points.
Average Consumer Balance, by Product*
*Represents the average balance held by a consumer across each type of product (consumers can have multiple instances of same product).
“Subprime consumers are more likely to feel the impact of higher costs of living and may choose to take on additional debt, such as credit card balances, to help cover the costs of goods and services. For other risk tiers of borrowers, their card balance growth has been less than the rate of inflation, indicating that these consumers are less reliant on credit cards to maintain purchasing power.”
- Matthew Fabian, director of financial services research and consulting at TransUnion Canada
About the TransUnion CIIR Report
TransUnion Canada’s quarterly Credit Industry Insights Report provides in-depth, statistical information drawn from its national consumer credit database (of more than 30 million files profiling nearly every credit-active consumer in Canada). It summarizes data and trends for the national population overall, as well as breakdowns within consumer credit score risk tiers, and provides insights on the Canadian consumer lending industry. By leveraging the Industry Insights Report, institutions across industries can analyze market dynamics throughout an entire business cycle, helping understand consumer behaviour over time. It provides account-level and consumer-level views of key metrics and trends — over the nine most recent quarters — and considers major consumer lending categories: credit cards, personal loans, auto loans, home loans, and lines of credit while also looking at aggregate views of all revolving lines of credit and non-revolving loans.
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