Americans who’ve maxed out their credit cards are starting to miss payments.

That’s not particularly surprising, but it’s worth mentioning in the context of the highest credit card rates on record and a mountainous pile of revolving debt.

Total credit card balances fell in Q1, according to the NY Fed’s quarterly debt report, released on Tuesday. Don’t celebrate. That’s a seasonal phenomenon, although those of you old enough to remember last year might recall that balances in fact didn’t fall in Q1 of 2023.

At $1.12 trillion, card balances were down $14 billion from the record reached in Q4.

Total open card accounts edged up near 597 million. (As a quick reminder, that tally isn’t de-duplicated, so it overstates the number of open accounts given that jointly-held accounts are counted twice).

The flow into early delinquency on cards rose to 8.93%, the highest since Q1 of 2011.

For the 18-29 cohort, transitions into serious delinquency approached double-digits for the first time since 2010.

But it’s not just younger borrowers. “Transition rates into serious delinquency continued to rise across all age groups,” Joelle Scally, a NY Fed researcher, said Tuesday, describing “worsening financial distress among some households.”

In a blog post that accompanied the release of the report, researches led by Andrew Haughwout, the director of Household and Public Policy Research in the NY Fed’s Research and Statistics Group, presented the chart below.

That speaks for itself: More than a third of maxed-out borrowers are falling behind on payments. With rates where they are (22% on average), those folks are going to get buried.

“The share of maxed-out borrowers has been increasing from pandemic lows and is approaching pre-pandemic levels, and the delinquency transition rates of these maxed-out borrowers are now noticeably higher than pre-pandemic, resulting in higher transition rates into credit card delinquency overall,” Haughwout wrote, adding that in order for the situation to improve at the aggregate level, those borrowers (the maxed-out cohort) would need to see lower delinquency transition rates or else their share as a percentage of all borrowers needs to fall.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way things are going. If current trends persist, Haughwout warned, card delinquencies “are likely to continue to rise.”

The data came on the heels of monthly figures from the Fed which showed revolving credit balances barely grew in March, rising the least since a decline three years ago.