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>Myself and some other people pay their cards off every month but that isn't the norm. Many people keep a balance

I've heard this statistic a lot, but I haven't seen any recent evidence it is true. I used to work for a bank, and our Credit Card holders would (mostly) pay off their balance every month.

We called them Transactors vs Revolvers. 85% of our CC were Transactors, and some of them would pay down multiple times a month


Lots of people carry a balance. Credit card lenders wouldn't exist or give away insane sign-up bonuses if they didn't.

From NerdWallet [^0]:

> A NerdWallet survey conducted by The Harris Poll in conjunction with our annual study in 2023 found that 43% of American adults who use credit cards (and 38% of all American adults) said they have revolving debt. The CFPB, meanwhile, found that at the end of 2022, payments on 48% of general purpose credit card accounts were for less than the full balance, meaning some debt was being revolved

Additionally,

> In 2022, credit card issuers “charged off” $37 billion in balances, meaning they determined that those balances weren’t going to be paid.

Total credit card debt in 2024 was ~$626.8 billion with a peak of $42 billion in 2019.

That was from my own cursory research. Here's how GPT-5 did when I asked it about this topic: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b9b95f-0b14-8012-be34-48cb3bd10d.... Taking a cursory look at the sources provided shows that its analysis is mostly correct.

[^0]: https://archive.ph/0AzYa

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