Americans have been falling behind on their credit card bills at the highest rate in 15 years. You wouldn't know it from the big banks' earnings on Tuesday.

Some 13% of credit card balances were 90 days or more delinquent in the first three months of the year, according to data released in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo all said that their 90-day-plus delinquencies were in the low single-digits and down from a year earlier in the second quarter. The banks cited consumers' resilient financial picture in reporting strong earnings on Tuesday.

Part of the disconnect is that banks have been focusing their businesses on prime and super-prime consumers. About 86% of Citigroup's balances are extended to consumers with FICO scores of 660 or higher, Gonzalo Luchetti, the company's chief financial officer said in a call with analysts Tuesday.

Banks have tightened their lending standards over the past few years, said Mike Taiano, senior analyst in the financial institutions group at Moody's.

Other credit card issuers that focus on consumers with lower credit scores have been reporting higher rates of delinquency in recent quarters.

Meanwhile, some banks have rolled out new premium credit cards with hefty sign-up fees, and they have targeted card offers more heavily at people with high credit scores.

"When you're looking at the holistic picture for credit quality, which can make or break a bank on the Main Street side, credit quality has actually been very benign," said Eric Chan, vice president of global nonbank financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS.

Another important reason for the discrepancy between the New York Fed data and the lenders' data is in how they measure delinquencies, economists and lenders say. The lenders tend to exclude delinquencies from their calculations once they are deemed uncollectible, while the New York Fed keeps delinquencies in its calculations until the debt is removed from credit reports, after seven years.

That means older delinquencies, including from after the pandemic when many borrowers fell behind, remain part of the New York Fed calculations, even if the debt is unlikely to be collected upon.

Consumers continued to add to their credit card balances, the banks said Tuesday. But net charge-offs, which are debts banks write off as losses, were down year-over-year for consumer debt at both Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo's consumer net charge-offs fell to $720 million in the second quarter from $750 million a year earlier.

"That's supported by the strong employment picture that we see more broadly," said Mike Santomassimo, chief financial officer at Wells Fargo. "Overall, you're seeing really good performance on the consumer side."

Consumers also benefited from tax refunds in the second quarter, bank executives said.

Bank executives have pushed back on the idea of disproportionate financial stress among lower-income Americans. There has been increased talk of divergent financial conditions among lower- and higher-income Americans, known as a K-shaped economy.

Jeremy Barnum, chief financial officer at JPMorgan, said the decrease in delinquencies stems from improvement in the labor market. He also said that spending held up across income segments.

"From our perspective, through all the various dimensions, there's not that much there in terms to support the K-shape narrative," Barnum said.

Write to Oyin Adedoyin at oyin.adedoyin@wsj.com and Elyse Goncalves at elyse.goncalves@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 15, 2026 13:07 ET (17:07 GMT)

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