Foreclosure Statistics (2026)

About 55,160 consumers had a new foreclosure notation added to their credit reports in the second quarter of 2026, a slight improvement on the 59,160 recorded in the first quarter.

In the same quarter, roughly 136,800 consumers had a bankruptcy notation added, a small increase from the previous quarter.

Both counts sit far below anything the series recorded before 2015, and the foreclosure figure is below the pre-crisis norm as well as far below the crisis peak.

The New York Fed has published this series quarterly since 2003, which makes the full arc visible rather than inferred.

It ran at 170,000 to 200,000 a quarter through the mid-2000s, peaked at 566,180 in the second quarter of 2009, and took until about 2015 to fall back under 120,000.

It then bottomed at 8,100 in the second quarter of 2021 under pandemic foreclosure moratoria, an artificial floor rather than a market outcome, which is why every comparison to 2021 overstates the deterioration since.

The reason is equity, not forbearance. US households held 71.6% of the value of their real estate as owners' equity in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Federal Reserve's Z.1 accounts.

A borrower with meaningful equity who cannot make payments has an alternative to default: sell the house, clear the mortgage and keep the difference. A borrower who owes more than the property is worth does not.

That is the mechanical difference between this cycle and the last one, when the equity share fell below 40% and selling stopped being an exit.

In the second quarter of 2026, 0.99% of mortgage balances were 90 or more days delinquent.

The comparison is stark: 12.92% for credit cards, 10.60% for student loans, 9.61% for other consumer debt, 5.49% for auto loans, and 3.31% across all household debt.

Home equity lines of credit sat alongside mortgages at 0.99%, and their delinquency transitions actually improved slightly in the quarter even as balances rose for a 17th consecutive time.

Of the 55,160 new foreclosures in the second quarter of 2026, 14,860 were consumers aged 40 to 49 and 11,460 were aged 50 to 59.

Only 2,940 were aged 18 to 29, and 7,680 were 70 or over.

The pattern follows exposure rather than fragility. Young adults are underrepresented because far fewer of them hold a mortgage at all, and the 40 to 59 band is the peak home-owning, peak-balance stage of life.

In 2026:Q2 the highest quarterly rates among the states the New York Fed tracks were Florida at 0.026% of consumers and Arizona at 0.025%, with California lowest at 0.011%.

The geography has changed. Nevada peaked at 0.88% of consumers in a single quarter of 2009 and now sits at 0.016%, a fall of about 98%.

The old sand-state pattern of Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California was a leverage story rather than a regional one, and once the leverage went so did the concentration.

This series counts people with a new foreclosure notation on their credit report, not properties and not completed repossessions.

A single household appears once even if it owns several properties, and an investor foreclosing on several units also appears once.

It also captures the notation at the point it lands on the file, which is earlier than a completed sale, so it is a measure of foreclosure starts rather than of homes lost.

In 2026:Q2 new foreclosures fell while new bankruptcies rose, which looks contradictory and is not.

Foreclosure is a secured-credit event driven by the value of the collateral. Bankruptcy is an unsecured-credit event driven by the total burden of card, medical and other debt.

With credit card delinquency at 12.92% of balances and mortgage delinquency at 0.99%, the two are responding to genuinely different pressures at the same time.

Total mortgage balances stood at $13.1 trillion at the end of June 2026, and the credit quality of newly originated mortgages was unchanged in the quarter.

Much of the outstanding stock was written at low fixed rates during 2020 and 2021, so the payment on those loans cannot rise no matter what happens to rates.

That is a form of built-in protection the previous cycle did not have, when adjustable-rate resets converted an affordable payment into an unaffordable one on a schedule.

Rising foreclosures require either a fall in house prices large enough to erase equity, or an employment shock big enough to stop payments across a wide population, and usually both.

Neither is visible in the current data: the equity share is near a multi-decade high, and mortgage delinquency at 0.99% leaves very little pipeline of troubled loans to convert into foreclosures.

The honest caveat is that this series is a lagging one. Foreclosure is the end of a process that starts with a missed payment, so the early-delinquency transition rate moves first and is worth watching in preference to the foreclosure count itself.

The low foreclosure level means there is no meaningful supply of distressed inventory, which was a real source of below-market purchases in the years after 2009.

It also means the market is not pricing in a wave of forced sellers, so waiting for one is a bet against the equity data rather than a plan.

For an owner, the relevant lesson from the series is that equity is what converts a payment problem into an inconvenience instead of a foreclosure, which is an argument for a down payment large enough to survive a price decline.

Foreclosure and bankruptcy counts, delinquency rates, balances, and the age and state breakdowns are from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for 2026:Q2, released in August 2026, and its published data workbook.

The report is built on the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel, an anonymised nationally representative sample drawn from Equifax credit report data.

The equity share is from the Federal Reserve Board's Z.1 Financial Accounts, table B.101, line 52, for 2026:Q1.