Every month, roughly half of American credit-card holders open a statement showing interest charges calculated at rates that have never been this high. The Federal Reserve’s G.19 statistical release, the government’s most authoritative dataset on credit-card pricing, recorded an average annual percentage rate of 22.12 percent on accounts assessed interest in early 2025, the highest figure in the 32-year history of the series. As of June 2026, that record still stands, and a bill that would slash those rates to 10 percent has not received so much as a committee hearing.
How the average APR nearly doubled in a decade
The 22.12 percent average did not appear overnight. In late 2013, the same Fed series pegged the average rate on interest-bearing accounts at about 12.9 percent. By mid-2023, it had climbed to roughly 22.8 percent. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a January 2024 analysis of that trajectory, flagged a detail that changes how consumers should think about future relief: the rise in credit-card APRs outpaced increases in the federal funds rate. Card issuers did not simply pass along the Fed’s rate hikes. They widened the gap between their own borrowing costs and what they charged customers, pushing interest-rate margins to an all-time high.
That margin expansion carries a practical consequence. Even if the Federal Reserve cuts its benchmark rate in the months ahead, cardholders should not assume their APRs will fall in lockstep. Issuers could absorb the savings, preserving the spread they have built over the past decade. The CFPB’s analysis has not been formally updated since January 2024, so whether margins have continued to widen, plateaued, or begun to compress remains an open question in public data.
The bill that would cap rates at 10 percent
H.R. 1944, the 10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act, was introduced by Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García during the 119th Congress in early 2025. The bill would amend the Truth in Lending Act to prohibit any credit-card APR, inclusive of all finance charges, from exceeding 10 percent. It includes anti-evasion provisions designed to prevent issuers from repackaging interest as fees, along with enforcement penalties for violations.
The measure was referred to the House Financial Services Committee, and there it has remained. The congressional record on Congress.gov shows no scheduled hearing, no markup, and no floor vote. No committee chair or ranking member has issued a public statement explaining the delay. The Congressional Budget Office has not published a score or cost estimate, which means there is no official projection of how many accounts would be affected or what the revenue impact on issuers would be.
In the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced companion legislation, S. 1357, proposing a similar cap. That bill, too, has stalled in committee. Together, the two measures represent the most direct congressional challenge to credit-card pricing in years, and neither has advanced past its initial referral.
Why the bill faces resistance it cannot yet answer
Consumer advocacy groups, including the National Consumer Law Center, have long argued that APRs above 20 percent trap lower-income borrowers in cycles of compounding debt. For a cardholder carrying a $5,000 balance at 22.12 percent, roughly $92 in interest accrues in a single month. Minimum payments, typically calculated as a small percentage of the outstanding balance plus that month’s finance charge, barely reduce the principal. A borrower making only minimum payments on that balance could spend more than a decade paying it off and surrender thousands of dollars beyond the original purchase price.
The banking industry’s counterargument is equally specific. Trade groups such as the American Bankers Association have warned that a hard 10 percent cap would force issuers to tighten underwriting, shrink credit lines for riskier borrowers, reduce or eliminate rewards programs, and introduce new fees to offset lost interest revenue. Some economists have echoed the concern that the borrowers the bill aims to help, those with lower credit scores and higher default risk, could find themselves shut out of the credit market entirely.
Both arguments are plausible on their face, but neither has been tested against a formal CBO analysis or independent economic modeling specific to H.R. 1944. Until the bill receives a hearing, the debate remains theoretical, fought in press releases and opinion columns rather than in scored legislative text.
What the federal data shows and what it hides
The Fed’s G.19 release, compiled from bank regulatory filings rather than voluntary surveys, tracks two categories: rates across all credit-card accounts and rates on accounts actually assessed interest. The second category is the more meaningful measure for the roughly half of cardholders who carry a revolving balance, according to Federal Reserve survey data, because it strips out consumers who pay in full each month and never incur a finance charge.
But the G.19 reports only national averages. It does not break out rates by income level, credit-score tier, or geography. A subprime borrower paying 29 percent and a prime borrower paying 17 percent both feed into the same number, and neither is individually visible. That limitation means the data confirms the overall trend but cannot show how the burden is distributed across households that are already stretched by housing costs, grocery bills, and insurance premiums.
The cost of congressional silence, measured in dollars per statement
Consider a cardholder who owes $5,000 at the current average rate of 22.12 percent and makes only minimum payments. Over two years, that borrower will pay more than $1,300 in interest alone, with much of the original balance still outstanding. Drop the rate to 10 percent and the two-year interest cost falls below $600. Multiply that gap across the tens of millions of Americans revolving credit-card debt each month, and the aggregate cost of inaction runs into the billions.
Whether Congress eventually moves on H.R. 1944, advances a different proposal, or leaves credit-card pricing entirely to issuers and market forces, the Fed’s own data has already delivered its verdict: the cost of carrying plastic debt has never been higher in the three decades since the G.19 series began. Every month that the bill sits without a hearing, that record is not an abstraction. It is a line item on a statement.
