Credit card interest rates in America average 22.30% APR — a number that would have violated the law in most US states before 1978. The legal framework that permits 22% interest (and the 29.99% penalty APR that follows a single missed payment) was constructed over a three-year window between 1978 and 1981 through a Supreme Court ruling, two opportunistic state legislatures, and a federal deregulation bill that nobody voted on as a credit card measure. The result is the highest sustained consumer interest rate environment in the developed world, $1.21 trillion in revolving credit card debt as of 2025, and an industry posting record profits while 111 million Americans cannot pay their balance in full each month.
Key Takeaways:
- Average credit card APR reached 22.30% in Q4 2025 (Federal Reserve G.19), with August 2025 data showing 23.99% for new offers. These represent the highest sustained rates in modern American history.
- Total revolving credit card debt hit a record $1.21 trillion in Q2 2025, up 5.87% year over year. 111 million Americans could not pay their full balance in late 2025; 27 million make only minimum payments.
- The Marquette National Bank v. First Omaha Service Corp Supreme Court ruling (December 18, 1978) allowed nationally chartered banks to export their home state’s interest rates to borrowers in all 50 states — effectively nullifying every state usury law simultaneously.
- South Dakota eliminated all usury caps in February 1980 to attract Citibank’s 3,000 jobs. Delaware followed. Within a decade, every major credit card issuer had re-chartered in one of the two states. The “race to the bottom” was literal and deliberate.
- The 1980 Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) provided the federal scaffolding that completed the deregulation. Before 1980, most states capped credit card rates at 12–18%. No federal cap exists today.
- Capital One’s $35.3 billion acquisition of Discover was completed in May 2025 (after Federal Reserve and OCC approval in April), creating the largest credit card lender by loan volume. Capital One’s net interest margin hit 8.26% in Q4 2025 — exceptionally high for a bank.
- American families paid $17 billion in credit card late fees in 2024. The CFPB’s $8 late fee cap rule — which would have saved $10 billion annually — was blocked by a federal court and effectively abandoned by the Trump administration in 2025.
- The Credit Card Competition Act (Marshall/Durbin) — which would have introduced routing competition for interchange fees — failed to advance, blocked by an estimated $430 million in industry lobbying.
- A 2023 Federal Reserve study confirmed that the interchange fee system functions as a regressive redistribution mechanism — transferring wealth from low-FICO, low-income cardholders (who pay higher embedded prices and more interest) to high-income rewards cardholders who pay in full each month.
- The EU caps interchange fees at 0.2%. The US has no federal cap. The average US merchant discount rate is 1.5%–3%, with premium rewards cards reaching 3.5%+. The difference is absorbed entirely by merchants — and passed to all consumers through higher prices.
- The household delinquency rate reached 4.8% in Q4 2025, the highest in eight years. Credit card delinquencies are driving the increase. JPMorgan Chase posted a 32% profit margin on $41.9 billion in Q1 revenue; $57 billion in full-year 2026 profits is projected.
- Trump promised a 10% credit card interest rate cap with a deadline of January 20, 2026. The deadline passed without action.
How High Are Credit Card Interest Rates? The Numbers Behind 22% APR and $1.21 Trillion in Debt
The Federal Reserve’s G.19 statistical release, which tracks consumer credit in the United States, recorded an average credit card APR of 22.30% on accounts assessed finance charges in Q4 2025. August 2025 data for new card offers showed 23.99%. These figures represent the sustained plateau of a rate run-up that began when the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by 525 basis points between March 2022 and July 2023 — but with a crucial asymmetry that reveals how the market actually functions: the Fed’s 100 basis points of cuts in 2024 produced almost no corresponding reduction in credit card rates. Rates went up when the Fed raised. Rates stayed up when the Fed cut. That asymmetry is not a mystery or an accident — it is the behavior of an oligopolistic market with no price ceiling.
The debt load sitting on top of those rates is staggering. Total revolving consumer credit — approximately 95% of which is credit card debt — reached $1.21 trillion in Q2 2025, a record high and up 5.87% year over year. According to CFPB and consumer survey data compiled in late 2025: 111 million Americans could not pay their credit card balance in full at year-end; 27 million are making only minimum payments; the average individual balance runs $6,580–$7,886 depending on the measurement source. The compound math at 22.30% APR on a $6,580 balance, paying only the minimum, means a consumer would take approximately 17–18 years to pay off the balance and pay roughly $9,000 in total interest on a $6,580 debt — more than double the principal. Related: our coverage of how 67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the junk fee economy’s $90 billion annual extraction, and the payday loan trap at 391% APR.
The delinquency picture is deteriorating. The household delinquency rate hit 4.8% in Q4 2025, the highest in eight years, driven primarily by credit card and student loan defaults. Credit card 60-day delinquencies are tracking back toward 2011 post-financial-crisis levels. This is not a marginal or abstract problem: rising delinquencies translate directly into more accounts hit with the 29.99% penalty APR, compounding the debt spiral for exactly the people least able to absorb it.
The Deregulation That Made This Possible: Marquette 1978, South Dakota 1980, and the Race to Eliminate Usury Caps
To understand why American credit card interest rates have no legal ceiling, you have to go back to December 18, 1978 — the date the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corporation. The case involved a deceptively narrow legal question: could a Nebraska-chartered national bank offer a credit card to Minnesota residents at Nebraska’s higher interest rate, rather than the lower rate Minnesota’s usury law permitted? The Supreme Court said yes. National banks, the Court held, could charge the rate permitted by their home state regardless of where the borrower lived.
The practical consequence was not narrow at all. It meant that whichever state was willing to eliminate its usury cap and invite bank charters would become the effective regulator for credit card rates nationwide. The race began immediately. In February 1980, South Dakota became the first state to completely eliminate its usury ceiling for credit card loans. The deal was transactional: Citibank CEO Walter Wriston had approached South Dakota Governor Bill Janklow with a straightforward proposition — eliminate your rate cap, and Citibank moves 3,000 jobs to your state. The South Dakota legislature approved Citibank’s invitation in a single day. The bank had actually helped draft the legislation. Delaware followed within a year, luring Chase, Manufacturer’s Hanover, Chemical, and Wells Fargo to establish credit card operations there. Both states have essentially operated as regulatory havens for credit card issuers ever since, collecting tax revenue in exchange for providing a regulatory environment with no consumer interest rate protection.
The federal architecture was completed on March 31, 1980, when President Carter signed the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA). The law was primarily aimed at phasing out Regulation Q interest rate ceilings on deposits — but Title V addressed state usury laws in ways that reinforced and formalized the charter arbitrage dynamic the Marquette ruling had unleashed. The backdrop was Paul Volcker’s shock therapy for inflation: by 1980, the prime rate had peaked at 21.5%, and banks were being squeezed between their cost of funds and the rates their home states permitted them to charge. DIDMCA provided regulatory relief — but it did so by removing consumer protection rather than by addressing the underlying inflation problem. Related: our coverage of the Glass-Steagall repeal, revolving door lobbying in Washington, and the CFPB gutting and its $19 billion cost to Americans.
Before this three-year deregulatory window, most states capped credit card rates at 12–18%. Consumers in New York, California, Minnesota, and other states with meaningful usury laws had a legal guarantee that their credit card issuer could not charge them more than their state allowed. After Marquette, DIDMCA, and the South Dakota/Delaware charter migration, that protection ceased to exist for anyone in any state — because every major issuer had re-domiciled in a state with no cap. The federal credit card rate ceiling that was never passed in 1978–1981 has never been passed since. The Boomer-era Congress that built this system did not put consumer credit in the same category as mortgage lending (which has regulatory frameworks) or payday lending (which many states cap). It simply removed the floor and let the market do whatever it wanted. The market, predictably, did exactly what markets do when there’s no ceiling: it found the highest rate consumers would tolerate before defaulting — and then set rates slightly below that.
How Four Companies Cornered the Market: The Mergers That Turned Credit Cards Into an Oligopoly
The Marquette-era deregulation created the legal environment for high rates. A subsequent wave of mergers created the market structure that entrenches them. The US credit card market today is dominated by four institutions — JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Capital One, and Bank of America — that collectively account for the large majority of outstanding revolving credit card balances. That wasn’t always the case. In the 1980s, dozens of regional banks and thrifts competed aggressively for credit card customers, driving some genuine rate and fee competition. The consolidation wave of the 1990s and 2000s changed that fundamentally.
Key mergers that built the current oligopoly: Bank One acquired First USA (the largest US credit card issuer of the late 1990s) in 1997. JPMorgan acquired Bank One in 2004. Bank of America acquired MBNA — then the nation’s largest independent credit card company — in 2006 for $35 billion. Each consolidation reduced the number of independent pricing decisions in the market and made it easier for the remaining players to maintain high rates without risking market share loss. Capital One’s acquisition strategy has been particularly aggressive: it acquired Hibernia, North Fork Bank, ING Direct, and HSBC’s US card business before its most consequential move — the $35.3 billion acquisition of Discover Financial Services, which received Federal Reserve and OCC approval in April 2025 and closed in May 2025. The Capital One-Discover merger is the largest credit card industry consolidation since BofA/MBNA, and it has important structural implications: Capital One now controls not just a massive card portfolio but Discover’s own payment network, the only independent US-owned rival to Visa and Mastercard. The 1,139 layoffs at Discover’s Riverwoods, Illinois headquarters that followed are a secondary consequence; the primary consequence is that one fewer independent pricing force exists in the US credit card market.
The profitability of this consolidated structure is visible in the numbers. JPMorgan Chase’s credit card division posts margins that many consumer-facing businesses would find impossible to believe. Capital One’s net interest margin — the spread between its cost of funds and the rates it charges borrowers — hit 8.26% in Q4 2025. For reference, a typical commercial bank’s net interest margin is 3–4%. Capital One’s margin is more than double the industry norm, reflecting a credit-card-centric model operating in a market with no rate ceiling and insufficient competitive pressure on pricing. JPMorgan Chase posted $57 billion in projected full-year 2026 profits, leading all US banks. The credit card division, along with investment banking, is the engine. As we’ve documented in our coverage of corporate consolidation across America and the stock buyback machine that followed, consolidation and profit extraction tend to move in lockstep — and the credit card industry is one of the clearest examples of that dynamic.
Late Fees, Penalty APRs, and the $17 Billion Annual Fee Extraction Machine
The 22.30% standard APR on a credit card account is not the most aggressive pricing tool the industry deploys. That distinction belongs to the penalty APR — the rate that applies when a cardholder misses a payment, typically 29.99% — and the late fee charged for the triggering missed payment itself. Both of these mechanisms are calibrated for maximum extraction from the consumers least able to pay: those experiencing financial stress who are most likely to miss a payment due are also the consumers who most depend on their credit card and have the fewest alternatives.
The late fee data is direct: American families paid $17 billion in credit card late fees in 2024, according to a CFPB report issued in December 2025. The average late fee is $32. The mechanics are straightforward: you miss a payment by a day; you’re charged $32; your APR may be retroactively increased to 29.99% on your entire balance; the higher interest payment makes the next month’s balance harder to pay in full; if you miss again, the penalty APR continues. This is not a marginal outcome for occasional careless borrowers — the CFPB’s analysis found that penalty pricing hits millions of accounts annually, disproportionately those of cardholders in financial distress.
The regulatory history of late fees is a case study in how consumer financial protections get blocked. In March 2024, the CFPB issued a final rule capping credit card late fees at $8 — down from the $32 average. The agency estimated the rule would save American families $10 billion annually. Within days, the credit card industry filed for a preliminary injunction in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas — a forum-shopped jurisdiction favorable to their arguments. A federal judge blocked the rule from taking effect. The CFPB appealed, and the case was working its way through the Fifth Circuit when the Trump administration took control of the CFPB in February 2025. The new CFPB leadership effectively abandoned the defense of the rule. The $10 billion in annual savings evaporated. The $17 billion in late fees continues. The Credit Card Competition Act (Marshall/Durbin) had it made it through Congress, might have introduced routing competition that would pressure issuers on fees — but it faced $430 million in lobbying opposition and stalled in the Senate multiple times. As we’ve covered in our analysis of the CFPB gutting and the revolving door lobbying machine, the pattern of regulatory capture in consumer finance follows a predictable script.
The CARD Act, the CFPB, and the Failed Reforms: Why Congress Can’t Fix What It Built
The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 — the CARD Act — is the most significant piece of credit card consumer protection legislation passed since the Truth in Lending Act of 1968. It achieved real things: no retroactive interest rate increases on existing balances (a practice that had become routine before 2009), mandatory 45-day advance notice before any rate increase, restrictions on issuing credit cards to consumers under 21 without a co-signer or proof of independent income, clearer disclosure requirements, and the requirement that minimum payment disclosures show how long it would take to pay off the balance making only minimums. These are meaningful protections and they improved outcomes for millions of cardholders.
But the CARD Act was negotiated in a political environment where the banking industry’s lobbying operation had already established the parameters of what was acceptable, and those parameters excluded the one reform that would have most directly addressed the rate problem: a statutory interest rate cap. The bill’s sponsors and the Obama administration opted for the achievable over the necessary, producing a law that constrained the most flagrant abuses while leaving the underlying pricing architecture intact. No ceiling on standard APR. No ceiling on penalty APR. No ceiling on late fees. No restriction on the “universal default” practice (raising a cardholder’s rate based on behavior with another lender). The market structure that permits 22.30% standard APR was not touched. The deregulation of 1978–1981 was not revisited.
The years since have seen a series of regulatory advances and retreats that collectively illustrate the limits of consumer financial protection in a system where the financial industry spends roughly $500 million per year on federal lobbying. The CFPB’s founding in 2011 — a direct product of the 2008 financial crisis and Elizabeth Warren’s policy work — produced the late fee rule, payday loan rules, buy-now-pay-later regulations, and numerous enforcement actions against card issuers. Trump’s first term saw the CFPB’s budget effectively constrained and its enforcement posture softened. The Biden-era CFPB was the most aggressive since the agency’s founding. Trump’s second term has seen a more systematic dismantling: the firing of CFPB director Rohit Chopra in February 2025, the appointment of acting leadership that froze enforcement, and the effective abandonment of the late fee rule. Trump also made a campaign promise to cap credit card interest rates at 10% — a populist pledge with genuine constituent appeal across the political spectrum. The deadline he set for himself was January 20, 2026. It passed without action. Related: the CFPB gutting cost Americans $19 billion, 67% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, and our analysis of who actually holds the financial assets.
The Interchange Fee’s Hidden Regressive Tax: Why Your Whole Foods Cashier Is Subsidizing Someone Else’s First-Class Upgrade
The interest rate charged to cardholders who carry a balance is the most visible mechanism of extraction in the credit card system. The interchange fee is the less visible one — and arguably the more pernicious, because it affects every consumer who shops at a retailer that accepts credit cards, including those who have never applied for one.
Interchange fees — sometimes called “swipe fees” or “merchant discount rates” — are fees that merchants pay to the card-issuing bank every time a customer pays with a credit card. Standard interchange rates range from approximately 1.5% to 2.5% for typical consumer cards; premium rewards cards (Platinum, Sapphire Reserve, Centurion) can charge merchants 3% to 3.5% per transaction. In aggregate, US merchants paid approximately $172 billion in card processing fees in 2023, the large majority of which were interchange fees passing through to card issuers. For comparison, the European Union caps interchange fees at 0.2% for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards under the Interchange Fee Regulation enacted in 2015. American merchants pay 5–10 times what European merchants pay for the same transaction processing service.
The cost doesn’t stay with merchants. In a competitive retail environment, it gets passed to all consumers through higher prices. And this is where the regressive element becomes clear: every consumer paying cash, debit, or a basic credit card pays the price increase embedded to fund rewards programs — but only the premium credit card user collects the miles, the cash back, and the airport lounge access. A 2023 Federal Reserve study confirmed exactly this dynamic: interchange fees function as a transfer from low-FICO, low-income cardholders to high-income, high-FICO cardholders who pay their balances in full and collect rewards. The Boston Federal Reserve’s public policy analysis estimated the per-household annual transfer could reach $1,133 from cash and debit users to top-tier rewards cardholders. This is not incidental to the rewards system — it is the rewards system. The rewards are paid by the cash-payers’ higher prices and the revolving borrowers’ interest. The people collecting Chase Sapphire’s 3x points on travel are, in a meaningful sense, being subsidized by people who can’t pay their grocery bill in full.
The Counter-Argument: Credit Cards Genuinely Expanded Financial Access
The case for the credit card industry’s position, stated honestly, is stronger than critics typically acknowledge.
Financial access is real and valuable: Before mass credit card issuance, access to emergency credit was largely restricted to those who already had banking relationships, collateral, or connections. The democratization of revolving credit over the past 40 years has given millions of Americans the ability to bridge unexpected expenses — a car repair, a medical bill, a gap between paycheck and rent — without turning to loan sharks, payday lenders, or family members. The $0 fraud liability, dispute resolution mechanism, and 21-day grace period for full-payers represent genuine consumer protections that cash users lack. The alternative to a credit card at 22% APR, for many borrowers, is a payday loan at 391% APR. As we’ve covered in our analysis of the payday loan trap, the alternative is not better.
Risk-based pricing has a rationale: Credit card issuers argue that the 22% average APR reflects the true cost of unsecured consumer lending — borrowers who default leave the lender with no collateral to recover. The credit card delinquency rate runs materially higher than mortgage delinquency rates, and the loss severity on charged-off credit card debt is higher than on most secured lending. Subprime credit card borrowers — those with FICO scores below 620 — present materially higher default risk, and the rates charged to them (often 26–29.99%) are calibrated to that risk rather than to pure profit extraction. This is a coherent actuarial argument. The problem is that it doesn’t explain why the US charges materially higher rates than European countries facing similar credit risk profiles in their consumer markets, or why the rate asymmetry between Fed hikes and Fed cuts persists so consistently. Risk-based pricing and oligopoly pricing produce similar outcomes — but they have different policy remedies.
A rate cap has tradeoffs: Economic research on interest rate caps — including the 36% Military Lending Act cap for servicemembers — suggests that hard caps can reduce access to credit for marginal borrowers rather than simply lowering the rate charged to them. If banks cannot charge 29% to a FICO-580 borrower, they often choose to not lend to that borrower at all. The empirical evidence on how different cap levels affect credit access is contested, but it is not zero. What the evidence does not support is the conclusion that the US’s current structure — with no ceiling and near-oligopoly concentration — represents the consumer-optimal outcome. The UK has a 0.8% daily cap for payday loans, the EU has interchange caps, and multiple G7 nations have either statutory rate caps or effective regulatory equivalents. The United States is the outlier by deliberate design, not actuarial necessity.
FAQ: Credit Card Interest Rates
Why are credit card interest rates so high in America?
The structural reason American credit card interest rates average 22.30% APR — substantially higher than in any comparable economy — is a three-part deregulatory sequence that occurred between 1978 and 1981: the Marquette Supreme Court ruling (allowing banks to export home-state rates nationally), South Dakota and Delaware’s elimination of all usury caps to attract banking jobs, and the 1980 DIDMCA’s federal scaffolding that formalized the system. Before 1978, most states capped credit card rates at 12–18%. After 1981, no effective ceiling existed for any consumer in any state. The subsequent consolidation of the credit card industry into four dominant issuers has reduced competitive pressure on rates, and the industry’s $430–$500 million annual federal lobbying expenditure has prevented the imposition of a statutory rate cap for more than 40 years.
What is a penalty APR and how does it get triggered?
A penalty APR — typically 29.99% — is an elevated interest rate that credit card issuers can apply to your entire account balance after a missed or late payment. Under the CARD Act of 2009, issuers must give you 45 days’ notice before raising your rate on future purchases, and they cannot retroactively apply the penalty APR to existing balances unless you are 60 days past due. Once triggered, however, the 29.99% rate applies to all new transactions and, after 60 days of delinquency, to existing balances as well. Issuers are technically required to evaluate whether to restore the standard rate after six months of on-time payments, but they are not required to do so. The CFPB has documented that penalty APRs disproportionately hit borrowers already in financial distress — the same consumers who paid $17 billion in late fees in 2024.
What would a 10% credit card rate cap actually do?
Trump’s campaign promise of a 10% credit card interest rate cap attracted cross-partisan support because the populist appeal is obvious: 10% is roughly half the current average APR and well below the 22–29% range where most revolving balances sit. The economic debate centers on access. Research on the Military Lending Act’s 36% cap for servicemembers suggests that capped rates reduce credit availability for the riskiest borrowers — issuers stop lending rather than lending at unprofitable rates. A 10% cap would be far more restrictive than 36% and would almost certainly reduce credit availability for subprime borrowers. The empirical question of whether the people denied credit at 10% are better or worse off depends on what they would otherwise use — if the alternative is a payday loan at 391%, the cap may be beneficial despite the access restriction. The political question of why the January 20, 2026 deadline Trump set for himself passed without action is answered simply: the credit card industry employs many of the same lobbyists whose relationships Trump’s administration cultivated in its first term, and a 10% rate cap would represent the single largest regulatory reduction in US credit card industry revenue in history.
Does paying in full every month mean I’m immune to the rate problem?
Not entirely. Cardholders who pay their full balance by the due date each month pay zero interest — the grace period is a genuine benefit. But you are not fully insulated from the credit card pricing system. The interchange fees embedded in every transaction you make (typically 1.5–3.5% of the purchase price paid by the merchant) are partially recovered through higher retail prices for all consumers, including those who pay cash or use debit. The Federal Reserve’s 2023 study confirmed that rewards programs are partially funded by cash users and low-income cardholders through this mechanism. If you carry a premium rewards card and collect 3x points while always paying in full, you are, in a modest but real sense, benefiting from a transfer from lower-income consumers who pay cash. That’s not a personal moral failing — it’s how the system was designed. The right place to object is not your personal credit card choices, but the legislative and regulatory framework that produced this system.
Sources & Methodology
Primary data sources:
- Federal Reserve G.19 Consumer Credit Statistical Release — average credit card APR 22.30% Q4 2025 / 23.99% August 2025 new offers / total revolving credit $1.21 trillion Q2 2025 / year-over-year growth 5.87%
- CFPB Consumer Credit Card Market Report, December 2025 — $17 billion in late fees 2024, 111 million Americans cannot pay in full, 27 million minimum-payment-only, penalty APR data, fee revenue record
- Federal Reserve / NY Fed Household Debt and Credit Report Q4 2025 — 4.8% household delinquency rate highest in 8 years
- Federal Reserve FEDS Working Paper 2023-007, “Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market” — confirmation of regressive redistribution from low-FICO to high-FICO cardholders
- Boston Federal Reserve Public Policy Discussion Paper, “Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations” — per-household transfer estimate cash/debit to rewards cardholders
- Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corporation, 439 U.S. 299 (1978) — Supreme Court ruling enabling interest rate exportation by nationally chartered banks
- South Dakota usury law elimination history (1980) — documented in Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, academic banking history, and news archives on Citibank-Janklow negotiation
- Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA), Pub. L. 96-221, signed March 31, 1980
- Federal Reserve and OCC Capital One-Discover merger approval — April 2025; completion May 2025; 1,139 layoffs Riverwoods, Illinois — Federal Reserve Board Order, OCC press release, Reuters/Bloomberg reporting
- Capital One Q4 2025 earnings — 8.26% net interest margin — Capital One Financial 10-Q/earnings release
- JPMorgan Chase 2026 projected profits $57 billion — bank earnings consensus reporting; Q1 32% profit margin $41.9 billion revenue — JPMorgan Chase earnings
- CFPB late fee rule, March 2024 — $10 billion annual savings estimate — CFPB press release and final rule text
- Texas federal court preliminary injunction blocking CFPB late fee rule — Fort Worth federal district court, 2024
- Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (CARD Act), Pub. L. 111-24
- Credit Card Competition Act (Marshall/Durbin) — Senate failure history; $430 million lobbying opposition estimate — OpenSecrets, SIFMA, ABA lobbying disclosure filings
- EU Interchange Fee Regulation 2015 — 0.2% consumer debit cap, 0.3% consumer credit cap
- US merchant processing fees $172 billion 2023 — Nilson Report
- Trump 10% rate cap promise and January 20, 2026 deadline — campaign statement, reporting on non-action
- Average individual credit card balance $6,580–$7,886 — Experian State of Credit 2025, TransUnion Credit Industry Insights Report
- Military Lending Act 36% APR cap for servicemembers research on access effects — DOD implementation report, academic literature on rate cap access tradeoffs
Methodology: APR statistics represent Federal Reserve G.19 reported rates for accounts assessed finance charges and for new card offers; individual rates vary significantly based on creditworthiness, card type, issuer, and market conditions. Delinquency statistics from NY Fed Household Debt and Credit Reports; definitions may vary from issuer-reported charge-off statistics. Interchange fee estimates from Nilson Report industry data; per-household transfer estimates from Federal Reserve academic working papers and represent modeled scenarios rather than direct observations. Capital One net interest margin and profit data from publicly reported Q4 2025 earnings. Political contributions and lobbying estimates from OpenSecrets lobbying database; figures are approximations for the Credit Card Competition Act legislative cycle and not definitive annual totals for the entire industry.
