Credit card issuers are officially back in growth mode. According to TransUnion’s latest Credit Industry Insights Report, in the second quarter of 2026, new credit lines rose 8.5% year over year to $126 billion, a trend led by continued growth in credit cards.
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Data Breakdown
This latest quarter marks the sixth consecutive quarter of growth for bankcard originations, as they rose 11.8% year over year to 20.6 million. According to the report, that growth is primarily being led by subprime and super-prime borrowers. Subprime originations rose 14.1% year over year, and super-prime originations rose 15% year over year.
As a result, bankcard balances increased to $1.14 trillion — a year-over-year growth of 4.4%. Total credit lines associated with new accounts also increased 20.9% year over year.
“Lenders have been originating a bigger portion of the new credit cards to the subprime group, and what has changed is their strategy of doing it,” says Michele Raneri, vice president and head of U.S. research and consulting at TransUnion. “While (lenders) have opened up for more people to get cards, they’re still increasing how much they can borrow, but they’re not increasing it as much as they are for super prime. … Now we’re seeing that (lenders) are granting (credit), but they’re just being cautious about how much they’re letting out the door to mitigate their risk.”
So more credit lines are being opened, but the limits for subprime borrowers are much smaller than super-prime borrowers.
Delinquencies Are Rising, but Banks Are Still Lending
We need to address the elephant in the room, though. Subprime borrowers are helping to drive growth in originations, but they’re also driving the growth in delinquency rates. The subprime population led the increase in consumer-level delinquencies in Q2 2026. However, the report does note that delinquency rates have modestly improved from last quarter.
So why are banks still lending? Well, it has to do with borrower-level delinquency rates versus balance-level delinquency rates.
“If you look at it on a consumer level, there are still as many consumers that are going bad, so they’re delinquent,” says Raneri. “But if you look at it on a balance level, it’s less.”
She then used herself as an example to better explain the situation. “So if you look at Michele and she’s got one bad account, then as a consumer, she’s considered ‘bad.’ But if you weight that by how much she has … a person who has $10,000 that they go bad on is different from a person who only has $500 that they go bad on. And so the balances that are going bad are lower than the number of consumers. So that’s what the difference is.”
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Looking Ahead
Several metrics will determine if this growth is sustainable in the long run, and Raneri says she’s keeping her eye on a few things as the year progresses. “I’ll continue to watch what the distribution of subprime and near-prime new credit cards are, new personal loans and the delinquency and utilization rates,” she says. “So right now, that balance-level delinquency has been managed well, and I’m expecting it to still be managed well. But if it doesn’t, then that would be (a sign) that maybe it’s entering another phase.”
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Give ‘Em Credit: Growth Continues Among Credit Card Issuers originally appeared on usnews.com
