Credit Card Balances Are Growing the Fastest in These 20 Cities

Credit Cards: The West Leads the Charge

Despite credit card balances growing more slowly in 2024 than in recent years past, there’s still outsized credit card balance increases in many metros of the Southwestern U.S. as well as select Florida metros.

Metros With the Largest Annual Increases In Average Credit Card Balances

One phenomenon that might help explain why so many of the spendy cities are in the U.S. Southwest and Florida is the increase in property insurance premiums. And in the case of many Florida communities, add the cost to address deferred maintenance on many condominiums, which has been recently required by state and local ordinances.

And while many consumers in these areas probably aren’t directly putting their home insurance premium purchases on a credit card, those increases can add thousands of dollars to their yearly expenses, pushing some consumers to buy more goods and services with credit. With credit card APRs that now average nearly 23% in the mix, you can begin to understand how shifting budgets outside of typical credit card purchases can nonetheless swell credit card balance levels.

Big Cities, Big Credit Card Balances

The story isn’t as complicated when identifying the metros in the U.S. where consumers carry the largest balances: In most cases, it’s a function of higher incomes and costs in these overwhelmingly large metros (despite being led by the smaller, tony bedroom communities surrounding less-tony Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Metros With the Largest Average Credit Card Balances

Comparing the list of the top 20 metros with the cost of living in each shows that 15 of the 20 metros have costs of living above the national average. Only three cities in Texas (Dallas, Houston and San Antonio); Jacksonville, Florida; and Virginia Beach, Virginia, have costs of living slightly lower than the national average. However, they do have other costly challenges, including higher prices for storm insurance along the Atlantic coast and, in the case of Texas, first-in-the-nation costs for automobile debt payments.

Monthly Payments Growing Even Faster in 2024, Despite Overall Inflation Subsiding

Think of monthly payments as debt repayments consumers owe their financial creditors each month. The emphasis is credit: Monthly bills for utilities and streaming services aren’t included in the calculation.

The monthly payment amount in this analysis is the sum total of the various repayments a consumer owes to creditors each month in the form of:

• Minimum payments on credit card balances
• Auto loan or lease payments
• Mortgage or home equity loan payment
• Student loans
• Personal loans

When sorting for metros where monthly payments have grown the most, Experian found 20 metros south of the Mason-Dixon line. Breaking down the list further: Eight of the 20 metros are in Florida, while another five are among the giant California metros.

But it’s some of the outliers here that are especially of note. McAllen, Texas, for example, has notably lower income levels than San Francisco, Seattle and even Oklahoma City, yet residents there have seen their monthly payments increase as swiftly as in metro areas where incomes are on the rise.

The increases in monthly payments in these cities, ranging from 7.5% to as much as 10.6% higher in 2024 than in 2023, is more than double the inflation rate of 3% over that same period. No wonder many consumers still believe inflation is raging, despite inflation rates returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Metros With the Largest Annual Increases In Average Monthly Payments

Largest Monthly Payments in Larger, More Educated Metros

When identifying metros with the largest average monthly payments, we’re back on familiar territory—higher-priced, higher-income metros generally sport higher monthly payments than the national average.

There’s a wrinkle, however: Monthly payments include student loans. As student loan repayments resumed last September, those metros with more recent graduates among the population were more likely to see their averages climb more than other locales.

Hence the appearance of research hubs like Boston, Minneapolis and exurban Salt Lake City metros appearing among those with the highest average monthly payments in the nation.

Metros With the Largest Average Monthly Payments

Other cities with Top 20 monthly payments are more familiar, as more than half of these cities are also among the cities with highest credit card balances as previously discussed.

The Bottom Line

Consumers living in metros with historically higher costs of living, as well as those experiencing recent price shocks in property insurance premiums, are enduring increased monthly financial obligations, as measured by the annual percentage increase in credit card balances and total monthly payments.

In metros where real income is high and growing higher, consumers can more easily support these debt levels. However, in cases where incomes are low and or growing more slowly, rising debt levels can be an expression of increased levels of consumer stress.

Finally, recent resumptions of student loan repayments in September 2023 means that average debt obligation levels may have increased more sharply in communities with higher than average levels of student loan borrowers.

Learn more >> How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt