--- title: "Credit Card Loans: definition, formula, and thresholds" description: "Credit Card Loans are unsecured revolving consumer loans accessed via a card network (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover). The asset class generates the highest yields and highest charge-off rates of any major US bank product." canonical_url: https://www.bankregreports.com/glossary/credit-card-loans/ source: BankRegReports category: "Asset Quality" units: "$" schedule: "Schedule RC-C" --- # Credit Card Loans > Credit Card Loans are unsecured revolving consumer loans accessed via a card network (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover). The asset class generates the highest yields and highest charge-off rates of any major US bank product. ## Formula ``` Credit Card Loans are reported on Call Report Schedule RC-C, Line 6.a. ``` Credit Card Loans include all balances on consumer credit card accounts, whether transactor balances that are paid off monthly or revolving balances that carry forward. Some banks include private-label cards (store cards serviced by the bank); others report them separately. ## Why it matters Credit cards are the highest-yielding major bank asset (15-25% APR on revolving balances) and the highest-loss asset (3-7% annualized charge-offs in normal times, 6-10%+ in recessions). The economics depend on a small set of dominant issuers: Chase, Capital One (which acquired Discover in May 2025), Citi, Bank of America, American Express and Wells Fargo together hold over 70% of US credit-card receivables. ## How to read it For most community and regional banks, credit-card loans are zero or trivial. Credit-card loans above 5% of total loans indicates a meaningful card business; above 30% indicates the bank is a card-led institution (Capital One, Synchrony). ## Thresholds | Range | Reading | What it means | |---|---|---| | 0–5% of loans | Light | Typical for non-card banks. | | 5–15% | Active | Established card business; not core. | | 15–30% | Major | Card-focused bank within a diversified portfolio. | | > 30% | Card-led | Card-dominant business model. | ## Worked example Capital One Bank, USA, N.A. reported $147B of credit-card loans at year-end 2024, over 60% of its total loan portfolio, making it the most card-concentrated large US bank. By contrast, a typical $5B community bank may carry zero credit-card loans, instead offering a co-branded card serviced by a third party. ## Questions ### Why are credit-card charge-offs so much higher than other lending? Because the loans are unsecured. There is no collateral to repossess on default. The lender's recovery is whatever it can collect from the borrower's other resources. The high yield is the compensation for this loss profile. ### Are credit-card loans risk-weighted higher? Yes. Under Basel III standardized approach, credit-card loans receive a 100% risk weight versus 50% for residential mortgages, recognizing both the unsecured nature and historical loss rate. ### How did the 2024 CFPB credit-card late-fee rule affect issuers? It did not take effect. The rule would have cut the safe-harbor late fee to $8 for the largest issuers, but a federal court stayed it before its May 2024 effective date and vacated it on April 15, 2025. ## Sources - [FFIEC Call Report Schedule RC-C, Line 6.a](https://www.ffiec.gov/sites/default/files/data/reporting-forms/FFIEC031_FFIEC041_202606_i.pdf) (PDF) - Federal Reserve G.19: Consumer Credit Outstanding ## Related metrics - [Consumer Loans](https://www.bankregreports.com/glossary/consumer-loans/): Consumer loans are credit extended to individuals for personal, household, and family purposes: credit cards, auto loans, and other personal loans. They carry higher yields but also higher and faster-moving loss rates than commercial credit. - [Net Charge-Offs](https://www.bankregreports.com/glossary/net-charge-offs/): Net charge-offs (NCOs) are the loans a bank has written off as uncollectible, less amounts recovered on previously charged-off loans. They are the realized credit losses that actually deplete the allowance. - [Total Loans & Leases](https://www.bankregreports.com/glossary/total-loans/): Total loans and leases is the gross amount a bank has lent out (commercial, real estate, consumer, and agricultural credit) before subtracting the allowance for credit losses. It is usually a bank's largest asset and its primary earning engine. - [Allowance for Credit Losses](https://www.bankregreports.com/glossary/allowance-credit-losses/): The allowance for credit losses (ACL), called the allowance for loan and lease losses (ALLL) before the CECL standard, is the reserve a bank holds against losses it expects on its loans. It is deducted from gross loans on the balance sheet, and under CECL it covers expected losses over each loan's whole life. ## About this document This is the markdown twin of the page named in `canonical_url` above. Source filings are public record; the cleaning, normalization, cross-source linkage, and derived metrics are BankRegReports' own. Attribute with a link to the canonical URL. Markdown twins are published for editorial content only. Institution data pages do not have them. For data at scale use the API, which is documented at https://www.bankregreports.com/api/ and specified at https://www.bankregreports.com/openapi.json. It returns typed JSON with explicit units and periods, and one call replaces hundreds of page fetches. ## Sitemap - [Glossary](https://www.bankregreports.com/glossary/): every metric, with formula and thresholds - [Blog](https://www.bankregreports.com/blog/): analysis and explainers - [API documentation](https://www.bankregreports.com/api/): the programmatic way to get this data - [XML sitemap](https://www.bankregreports.com/sitemap.xml): the complete crawlable index