A 68-year-old who expected to enter retirement debt-free but is instead juggling a credit card balance, an auto loan, and a lingering medical bill is no longer an outlier. Between 2019 and 2022, median total debt for households headed by someone aged 65 to 74 climbed, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the federal government’s richest source of data on what American families own and owe. Credit cards, car payments, and medical obligations all contributed. The pattern upends a core assumption of traditional financial planning: that people shed debt as they age. For a growing share of baby boomers, the opposite is playing out.
The numbers behind the borrowing surge
The SCF, conducted every three years, breaks out debt by age band. Its 2022 wave showed that households in the 55-to-64 bracket were more likely to hold debt than they were three years earlier, and that conditional median balances for the 65-to-74 group rose over the same stretch. Credit card debt was a major driver: both the share of older households carrying revolving balances and the size of those balances increased during the pandemic years, a period when stimulus payments and enhanced unemployment benefits were supposed to stabilize household finances, not leave them deeper in the hole.
Auto loans compounded the problem. Many older adults replaced aging vehicles during a stretch of inflated sticker prices and elevated interest rates, locking in monthly payments that now compete with groceries and Medicare premiums for a slice of fixed income. Mortgage debt, while less surprising for the 55-to-64 cohort, also persisted further into retirement than historical norms suggest. Some households in their late 60s and early 70s still carry six-figure home loans.
The Fed’s Distributional Financial Accounts, which allocate aggregate household liabilities across age groups and generational cohorts on a quarterly basis, extend the picture beyond 2022. Through the most recently available quarters, the share of total U.S. household debt held by older Americans has not meaningfully retreated, even as younger borrowers continue taking on student and housing debt of their own. That persistence suggests the SCF trends were not a pandemic-era blip.
Late payments are stuck above pre-pandemic levels
Carrying debt is one thing. Falling behind on it is another. A November 2025 Federal Reserve research note analyzing credit bureau records from CCP/Equifax found that credit card and auto loan delinquency rates rose sharply after pandemic-era forbearance programs expired, then leveled off through the third quarter of 2025. They did not, however, fall back to pre-2020 levels.
The publicly available data do not isolate delinquency rates for boomers specifically, so pinpointing whether older borrowers are defaulting at higher or lower rates than younger ones is not yet possible. But the combination of rising balances among 55-plus households and economy-wide delinquency rates stuck above pre-pandemic norms points to real repayment strain across the age spectrum, including among people whose peak earning years are behind them.
When a credit card becomes a lifeline
Balance-sheet data capture what people owe. The Fed’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, known as SHED, captures how that debt feels. The 2024 edition, published in May 2025, found that a notable share of adults 65 and older reported carrying a credit card balance from month to month rather than paying in full. That is a signal of cash-flow pressure that raw debt totals alone cannot convey.
SHED respondents who carry balances are also more likely to report skipping or postponing medical and dental care, suggesting debt and health decisions feed each other in a punishing loop. Consider a retiree who puts a $3,000 dental bill on a credit card at 22% APR and can only make minimum payments. That balance balloons, crowding out spending on prescriptions or preventive visits, which in turn raises the odds of a bigger medical bill down the road.
Because SHED relies on self-reporting, it likely understates the problem. People tend to round down balances, forget about store cards, or classify medical payment plans as something other than debt. Still, when self-reported strain lines up with administrative credit bureau data and the Fed’s own balance-sheet surveys, the overall picture gains credibility.
Medical bills as a debt accelerant
A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spotlight report on medical debt among older adults, drawing on 2019 census data, documented the problem even before COVID-19 arrived. Adults 65 and older were disproportionately likely to have medical collections on their credit reports, and the downstream effects on credit scores and borrowing costs were significant. For retirees on fixed incomes, a single hospitalization or a chronic condition requiring ongoing treatment can translate into years of elevated balances.
The landscape has shifted since that report. Credit-reporting rules changed in 2022 and 2023, removing many small medical debts from consumer credit files. That may have improved some older adults’ scores on paper without actually reducing what they owe. Meanwhile, healthcare costs have continued to outpace general inflation, and Medicare out-of-pocket limits still leave substantial exposure for serious illness. No comparable primary study has yet quantified how medical debt among seniors evolved through the pandemic and its aftermath, so the 2019 baseline remains the best available anchor and almost certainly understates today’s reality.
The home equity counterpoint
Any honest accounting of boomer finances has to acknowledge the other side of the ledger. Many older homeowners sit on substantial equity after years of rising property values, and on a net-worth basis, plenty of 65-plus households are better off than their parents were at the same age. The SCF confirms that median net worth for the 65-to-74 group rose between 2019 and 2022.
But home equity is not the same as liquidity. A retiree with $300,000 in equity and $18,000 in credit card debt cannot pay Visa with a spare bedroom. Tapping that equity requires selling, downsizing, or taking out a reverse mortgage, each of which carries costs, complexity, and emotional weight. The debt problem is not that boomers are broke on paper. It is that their obligations are liquid and immediate while their biggest asset is not.
A generation running out of runway
Roughly 11,000 Americans turn 65 every day, according to U.S. Census Bureau population projections, a pace that will continue through the end of the decade as the largest boomer cohorts cross the threshold. Each one who enters retirement carrying revolving credit card debt or an auto loan faces a math problem that only gets harder: fixed income on one side, compounding interest on the other. Unlike younger borrowers, most retirees cannot solve a debt problem by earning more. They can downsize, delay Social Security to increase monthly benefits, or negotiate medical bills, but the menu of options narrows with age.
For policymakers, the trend raises uncomfortable questions about the adequacy of the safety net. Medicare’s coverage gaps, the absence of a national long-term care insurance program, and the erosion of traditional pensions all push costs onto individuals at the moment they are least equipped to absorb them. For families, it means conversations about aging parents’ finances may need to start earlier and go deeper than anyone expected.
The next wave of SCF data, covering the period through 2025, will not arrive until late 2026 or 2027. Until then, the available evidence as of spring 2026 points in one direction: baby boomers are borrowing more, paying it off more slowly, and entering retirement with balance sheets that look nothing like the debt-free golden years the generation was promised.
