Grocery prices have increased substantially in recent years, rising 24 percent since 2020, with another 3 percent increase predicted in 2025. These rising costs are squeezing family budgets and causing households to reduce the amount of food they buy, switch to cheaper alternatives, and take on credit card debt.
In 2023, the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey found that 1 in 4 adults paid for groceries with a credit card and took on debt, either by not making the minimum payment or carrying a balance.
New Urban analysis of credit records shows that credit card delinquencies rose 39.8 percent during this period of increased food prices.
Though rising food prices are not the only factor behind the rise in credit card delinquencies, these data do indicate growing financial distress among US families. Consumers with past-due credit card payments are likely accruing interest on purchases, which can compound over time and cause hardship if debt burdens exceed what they can repay easily. With credit card interest rates exceeding 28 percent, the risk of financial hardship is even greater. If people remain delinquent, their credit scores will drop, which could limit their ability to access credit, secure housing, or find employment.
Here, we show where credit card delinquencies have increased between February 2022 and August 2024 and how many consumers are past-due on their credit card bills now.
What’s at stake?
As food price inflation began to rise in late 2021, credit card delinquencies grew nationally. By August 2024, an estimated 8.4 million Americans—1 of every 20 consumers with a credit card—were at least 60 days past-due on credit card bills. Data from the New York Federal Reserve find that outstanding balances among those who were 90-plus days delinquent totaled $1.21 trillion in the last quarter of 2024.
Many of these delinquencies are likely driven by consumers whose credit is maxed out. When consumers face financial pressure, they tend to prioritize other types of debt repayment before credit cards. And living expenses—including rising grocery costs—can cause consumers to turn to credit more often.
Since 2020, living costs have increased 21 percent, with the largest price increases concentrated in transportation, food, and housing. The cost of food increased slightly more than overall prices during this period. These increases disproportionately affect consumers with low incomes, who spend nearly one-third of their pay on food. When faced with more-expensive food costs, consumers may reduce the amount of food they eat, switch to cheaper alternatives, use savings to pay for food, and turn to other strategies such as relying on credit.
Credit card delinquencies rose in every state and 85 percent of counties between 2022 and 2024. However, some areas experienced deeper challenges. In nine counties across five states, delinquency rates were three times the national average.
Rural, Southern, and Western counties experienced the largest increases in delinquency rates between 2022 and 2024. Fifteen of the 20 counties with the highest delinquency rates in 2024 were in rural areas, and delinquency rates rose from near 0 percent to more than 7 percent in several Southern and Western counties. In general, many of the counties with the highest delinquency rates were in the South.
Relying on credit for basic living expenses can exacerbate long-term financial instability. Accrued debt can be challenging to repay and can undermine people’s long-term creditworthiness if not repaid on time. Missing a credit card payment for more than 30 days can drop credit scores by up to 100 points, and low credit scores can prevent families from being approved for loans and building wealth. Delinquencies can also undermine families’ physical and mental health and make it more challenging for people to access employment opportunities and secure housing.
Right now, families are struggling to meet their financial obligations. Any policy changes that lead to price increases, employment instability, and other unexpected financial shocks in the months to come could push even more families into distress.
About the data
How do we calculate credit card delinquency rates?
Credit card delinquency rates are derived from a nationally representative panel of deidentified, consumer-level records from a major credit bureau. The credit bureau data are from February 2022 and August 2024 and contain more than 5 million records in 2022 and 10 million records in 2024. Credit card delinquencies are defined as the share of people with credit or charge card debt who are 60 or more days delinquent.
In the dataset, missing and unavailable values are noted with “NA.” Some values are missing because no data are available. Others are missing because credit bureau metrics are not reported when they are based on fewer than 50 people. For estimates of county-level changes in credit card delinquencies between February 2022 and August 2024, we suppress counties with few people with delinquencies. For small-population counties, estimates of changes in credit card delinquency rates may be more variable over time.
We report credit bureau but not other data (including changes in meal costs and the estimated number of people with delinquencies) at the county level for Connecticut because the US Census Bureau implemented significant changes to county boundaries for Connecticut in 2022, and our credit bureau data provider has not yet updated these boundaries.
How do we calculate the number of people with credit card delinquencies?
We estimate the number of people with credit card delinquencies by taking the population of adults older than 18 from the 2018–22 American Community Survey and adjusting by the share of adults who have a credit record and the share of consumers with a credit card. Among this adjusted population, we estimate the number of people who have a credit card delinquency using the delinquency rate. We assume that 89 percent of US adults in all states and counties have a credit record based on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates of credit invisibles (PDF). We use state- and county-specific rates for the share of consumers with a credit card and for credit card delinquency rates to estimate number of people for each geography. For counties with fewer than 50 people estimated to have a credit card delinquency, we label observations “< 50.”
How do we calculate the change in the average cost of a meal at the county level?
We calculate the change in the estimated cost per meal as the difference between these costs for 2022 and 2024. The estimated cost per meal for each year is calculated from information on reported food expenditures from the Current Population Survey and local price index data from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap study, based on data contributed by NielsenIQ.
We calculate national-level meal costs using weekly reported food expenditures from the 2022 Current Population Survey and divide by meals eaten per week. We restrict the responses to people who are food secure, as food-insecure families are likely underspending on food because of limited resources. We then used the USDA’s Economic Research Service Consumer Price Index for Food (for food-at-home) to trend this upward to a meal cost in 2024.
We then adjust the national cost per meal for the relative prices paid for the Thrifty Food Plan market basket in each county in the US. Our source for a county-level food price index is Feeding America’s annual Map the Meal Gap study, which is based on food price data contributed by NielsenIQ. These data are weighted to the Thrifty Food Plan market basket based on pounds purchased by men ages 19 to 50; though other Thrifty Food Plans for different ages and sexes would produce different total market basket costs, relative pricing between counties is not affected. We then translate the total market basket (including any applicable state and county sales taxes on groceries) into an adjustment factor that can be applied to any dollar amount. This adjustment differs by county, revealing differences in food costs at the county level.
PROJECT CREDITS
This data tool was funded by internal Urban Institute funds. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts.
We are grateful for the data contributions from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap study (supported by Conagra Brands Foundation), which uses food price data contributed by NielsenIQ to estimate county-level meal costs. We appreciate the contributions of Craig Gundersen and Adam Dewey to the county-level meal price estimates used in this tool. We also thank Elaine Waxman, Breno Braga, and Poonam Gupta for their contributions to and review of this tool.
RESEARCH: Kassandra Martinchek
DATA VISUALIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT: Mitchell Thorson
EDITING: Wesley Jenkins and Alex Tammaro
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