Monthly data on credit union lending is available from America’s Credit Unions in a new format: the Monthly Credit Union Lending Estimates dashboard. Launched this month, the new evaluation tool provides month-over-month, year-to-date, and year-over-year loan growth data for U.S. credit unions.

It also allows comparison of credit union data to other lenders, such as banking institutions, mortgage companies, credit card companies and auto financing companies.

Key trends in the January loan data include: 

• Generally slow loan growth reflects consumer caution against a backdrop of stubbornly high inflation, still-high interest rates and modest declines in consumer confidence;
• Credit union loans outstanding increased by only 0.21% in January - nearly matching the previous month’s 0.22% gain and outpacing the 0.13% in January 2024. Over the past 20 years, typical credit union January loan growth (0.45%) is more than double the recent reading.
  • Home equity lines of credit stood out in January, increasing 1.34%, while both second mortgages (1.04%) and credit cards (0.92%) continue to reflect strong monthly gains.
• Year-over-year credit union loan growth also slowed, reflected in a 1.6% increase in total outstanding balances. That compares to a 12-month increase of 5.3% in the year ending January 2024 and a 15.4% increase in the year ending January 2023.
  • On a year-over-year basis home equity lines of credit (16.6%), second mortgage loans (10.5%) and credit cards (7.2%) reflect the biggest annual gains.

The report is generated from the Equifax Analytic Dataset (ADS), an anonymized random sample of credit report data that tracks 10% of all U.S. consumers with a social security number. Updated monthly, the ADS contains consumer and tradeline-level data on various loan types beginning in July 2005 and is updated monthly. It contains over 33 billion total records (and over 140 million records monthly).

America’s Credit Unions plans to update the dashboard with more data (including state-level data), graphics, and charts in future releases.