calc.one study · 2026-05-03

Credit card debt by state, 2026: where Americans owe the most

Name: Average credit card debt by US state, 2026
Creator: calc.one
Published: 2026-05-03
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The average cardholder in Alaska carries $8,077 in credit card debt, roughly $2,748 more than the average cardholder in Iowa ($5,329), the largest spread in the country. Nationally, US households are carrying about $1.28 trillion in revolving credit card debt.

Highest avg balance

Alaska

$8,077 per cardholder

Lowest avg balance

Iowa

$5,329 per cardholder

Median state

$6,359

Louisiana, midpoint of the 51 ranked

National total

$1.28T

revolving balances, NY Fed Q4 2025

The 10 states with the highest average balance

The top of the list mixes high-cost-of-living coastal states (New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland) with energy-economy states where wages and prices both run high (Alaska, Texas). Alaska tops the country at $8,077, almost $2,748 above the lowest state.

The 10 states with the lowest average balance

The lowest-balance states cluster in the upper Midwest (Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota) and Appalachia (Kentucky, West Virginia). Lower nominal balances do not always mean lower financial stress; Iowa and several other low-balance states still post utilization rates above the national average, which is what most directly drags down a credit score.

Median balance by region

Aggregated to four Census regions, the spread compresses but the pattern is unmistakable. The South and West carry the heaviest median balances; the Midwest sits well below. The Northeast splits: Connecticut and New Jersey are in the top tier, but Maine, Vermont, and Pennsylvania pull the regional median down.

What the numbers mean

Three things drive a state's average balance: prices (what a cardholder spends per month, much of which is non-discretionary), wages (how much of that spend is paid down vs revolved), and credit access (utilization is bounded by available limit). The states at the top of this list run hot on at least two of the three. Alaska pairs high prices with high wages and high utilization. New Jersey and Connecticut pair high prices with high limits, which mechanically enables larger balances.

The states at the bottom mostly run quiet on all three. Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota post some of the lowest utilization rates in the country (24-26%) and some of the highest average FICO scores (730+). They carry less debt because they revolve less of their available credit, not because their limits are smaller.

Utilization tells the more interesting story. The five states with the highest average revolving utilization are Mississippi (36%), Louisiana (35%), Alaska (34%), Georgia (34%) and Texas (33%). Utilization above 30% is the threshold most credit-scoring models flag as harmful, and four of those five also rank in the bottom five for average FICO score. The state with the lowest average FICO (Mississippi, 680) also has the highest utilization in the country (36%); these are not coincidences.

A practical frame: at the national average credit card APR of about 22%, the average cardholder in Alaska accrues roughly $148/month in interest alone, before any principal moves. The average cardholder in Iowa accrues about $98/month. That is the cost of carrying the balance, not paying it down. The credit card payoff calculator models how long it takes to clear any specific balance at a given APR and monthly payment.

A few less-obvious patterns worth flagging:

Mississippi has the lowest average FICO score in the country (680) and the highest average utilization (36%), despite an average balance below the national average. The story there is less debt in absolute dollars, more debt as a share of the limit it sits against.
Alaska's $8,000+ average is an outlier even among high-balance states. The next-highest (DC at $7,861) is more than $200 below it. Alaska also posts the second-highest utilization rate (34%), suggesting balances are tracking prices, not just credit limits.
The Midwest dominates the lowest-debt list but the South dominates the highest-utilization list. Lower nominal debt, higher relative debt, the two patterns coexist by region.
Texas pairs a high average balance with low FICO. At $7,467 per cardholder and an average FICO of 695, Texas is one of the few high-balance states where credit health is clearly under pressure; most of the high-balance group (NJ, CT, HI, MD, CA) sits well above 720.

None of these numbers is a recommendation about a specific household. Averages compress every income tier and every age bracket into one figure; a 25-year-old in Vermont and a 55-year-old in Vermont will look nothing like each other. What this study isolates is the geography of the average, not the typical individual experience. To model your own debt, plug your balance, APR, and monthly payment into the credit card payoff calculator; to see how lenders translate income and debt service into a maximum mortgage payment, the mortgage affordability calculator applies the same DTI logic.

Full state-by-state table

Sorted by average credit card balance per cardholder, descending. Download the complete dataset (with utilization, FICO, and region) as data.csv.

Rank	State	Region	Avg balance	Utilization	Avg FICO	Interest at 22% APR/mo
1	Alaska	West	$8,077	34%	722	$148
2	District of Columbia	South	$7,861	28%	715	$144
3	New Jersey	Northeast	$7,605	27%	724	$139
4	Connecticut	Northeast	$7,568	28%	726	$139
5	Hawaii	West	$7,560	28%	732	$139
6	Maryland	South	$7,492	31%	715	$137
7	Texas	South	$7,467	33%	695	$137
8	Florida	South	$7,392	31%	707	$136
9	Nevada	West	$7,308	33%	701	$134
10	Colorado	West	$7,267	27%	731	$133
11	Georgia	South	$7,238	34%	695	$133
12	Virginia	South	$7,200	28%	723	$132
13	California	West	$7,080	27%	722	$130
14	New York	Northeast	$7,010	28%	721	$129
15	Washington	West	$6,975	26%	735	$128
16	Massachusetts	Northeast	$6,853	25%	732	$126
17	Delaware	South	$6,841	30%	714	$125
18	Arizona	West	$6,800	30%	712	$125
19	Illinois	Midwest	$6,726	28%	720	$123
20	New Hampshire	Northeast	$6,692	25%	736	$123
21	Rhode Island	Northeast	$6,686	28%	721	$123
22	Utah	West	$6,532	29%	730	$120
23	South Carolina	South	$6,498	31%	700	$119
24	North Carolina	South	$6,434	31%	709	$118
25	Wyoming	West	$6,406	29%	725	$117
26	Louisiana	South	$6,359	35%	690	$117
27	Oklahoma	South	$6,291	33%	696	$115
28	Pennsylvania	Northeast	$6,245	27%	722	$114
29	Tennessee	South	$6,243	30%	706	$114
30	Oregon	West	$6,199	27%	732	$114
31	Idaho	West	$6,131	27%	730	$112
32	Montana	West	$6,122	27%	732	$112
33	Kansas	Midwest	$6,082	28%	722	$112
34	Alabama	South	$6,074	33%	692	$111
35	Minnesota	Midwest	$6,068	24%	742	$111
36	Missouri	Midwest	$6,042	29%	714	$111
37	New Mexico	West	$6,023	31%	702	$110
38	North Dakota	Midwest	$5,991	27%	733	$110
39	Nebraska	Midwest	$5,945	26%	731	$109
40	Michigan	Midwest	$5,932	28%	719	$109
41	Vermont	Northeast	$5,928	26%	737	$109
42	Ohio	Midwest	$5,871	28%	716	$108
43	Arkansas	South	$5,826	33%	695	$107
44	Maine	Northeast	$5,826	26%	731	$107
45	South Dakota	Midwest	$5,717	27%	734	$105
46	Indiana	Midwest	$5,621	29%	712	$103
47	Mississippi	South	$5,553	36%	680	$102
48	West Virginia	South	$5,427	31%	702	$99
49	Kentucky	South	$5,399	30%	705	$99
50	Wisconsin	Midwest	$5,370	24%	738	$98
51	Iowa	Midwest	$5,329	26%	730	$98

What this means for your payoff

The state averages are a comparison tool, not a target. Whatever your state's number is, the math for clearing your balance is the same: at a fixed APR, the higher the monthly payment, the shorter the timeline and the smaller the total interest cost. A balance at the national average ($6,494) at 22% APR with a $200 monthly payment takes roughly four years to clear and costs about $4,000 in interest along the way; the same balance at $400 a month clears in under two years and costs under $1,500. The credit card payoff calculator runs the exact numbers for any combination of balance, APR, and monthly payment.

Methodology

Primary data source. Experian State of Credit Cards report (Q3 2024 release), retrieved 2026-05-03. Per-state figures represent the average credit card balance among consumers with at least one open credit card account, the average revolving utilization rate, and the average FICO 8 score. The Experian release reports Q3 2024 data; no more-recent state-level breakdown was published as of the retrieval date.

National context. NY Fed Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit (Q4 2025 release), released February 2026. The aggregate revolving credit card balance figure ($1.28 trillion) and delinquency-trend commentary come from this report; the NY Fed does not publish state-level breakdowns at the same frequency.

Interest cost column. Computed as balance × 0.22 ÷ 12, where 0.22 is the typical US credit card APR per LendingTree industry data. This is the monthly interest accrual on the average state balance at the average rate; individual cardholder APRs range from roughly 15% (rewards-light cards, prime credit) to 30% (subprime cards, deferred-interest promotions that lapsed). Use the credit card payoff calculator to plug in a real APR.

What this study does not include. Median balances (Experian publishes mean only at the state level; medians are typically 30-50% lower because the right tail of the distribution is long), individual-income context, household-level debt totals (a household with two cardholders carries roughly twice the per-cardholder average), or store-card balances (those are included in Experian's "credit card" category but excluded from some other publishers' definitions). The figures here are cross-sectional averages, not cohort or longitudinal data.

Reproducing the math. The state table is the Experian data verbatim. The interest column is direct arithmetic: multiply any row's balance by 0.22, divide by 12. The credit card payoff calculator solves the standard fixed-payment amortization formula for months-to-payoff at any APR.

Computed and published by calc.one on 2026-05-03. The state-by-state CSV is released under CC BY 4.0; feel free to reuse with attribution to calc.one. Questions or corrections: contact us.