Update: Card Charge-Offs −62 bp YoY — CRE Delinquency Still Stuck at 1.56%

Our bank & commercial credit research map answered the portfolio geography question: cards own realized losses, CRE owns the past-due stock, CMBS office owns the securitized headlines, and mid-size banks own the concentration. This update asks the vintage question the next Fed print always forces: what moved?

The Federal Reserve’s seasonally adjusted charge-off and delinquency release (last update May 19, 2026) still closes on 2026Q1. Versus 2025Q1, credit-card charge-offs fell 0.62 percentage points to 3.84% — the loudest cooling print on the bank loss ledger. CRE delinquency barely budged, finishing at 1.56% (−0.01 pp YoY, −0.02 pp QoQ). CRE net charge-offs are still tiny at 0.17%, lower than a year ago (−0.05 pp) but up 0.03 pp from 2025Q4’s 0.14%. That is the update’s contradiction in one sentence: consumer losses are easing; CRE stress remains a past-due story with a faint QoQ conversion tick.

The vintage scoreboard

Read the table left-to-right and the regime is clearer than any single headline. Cards cooled on both axes. CRE past-dues froze. CRE charge-offs bounced off a 2025 trough. C&I losses crept higher. Residential delinquency rose without any charge-off print — the lag case that still keeps home-loan stress off the income statement.

Cards still own the losses — but the peak is fading

The dashboard’s Δ meters panel sorts signed vintage moves. On a YoY lens, card charge-offs (−0.62 pp) dominate every other category. That is not a rounding error; it is a full peak-fade from the 2024–early-2025 consumer-loss spike. Card delinquency also eased (−0.14 pp YoY), so the cooling is not just recoveries or accounting noise — the past-due stock and the write-off rate are moving together.

Toggle to QoQ and the same story continues at a quieter volume: cards −0.23 pp on charge-offs, −0.02 pp on delinquency. Total loan charge-offs are now 0.56%, down from 0.64% a year earlier. Industry losses remain above the soft pre-hiking trough, but they are no longer climbing.

For category-level loss geography without the vintage framing, the dedicated charge-offs dashboard still holds. This update’s job is different: show that the consumer fire is smaller than it was twelve months ago, even though it remains the largest fire on the P&L.

CRE’s sticky past-dues and the QoQ charge-off tick

CRE delinquency at 1.56% is effectively unchanged from the research print and from 2025Q1 (1.57%). That stickiness matters more than the one-basis-point YoY dip. After roughly doubling from the 2021 trough, bank CRE past-dues have plateaued rather than mean-reverted. The CRE path panel shows delinquency hugging 1.5–1.6% while charge-offs spent 2025 drifting down to 0.14% before the 0.17% 2026Q1 bounce.

That bounce is small in absolute terms — three basis points — and CRE charge-offs remain an order of magnitude below cards. But directionally it answers the conversion question the research post flagged: are past-dues starting to become losses? One quarter is not a cycle break. It is a watch item. If CRE charge-offs sustain above ~0.25–0.40%, the “managed stress” story starts to look more like a loss cycle. Until then, the multiple panel still prints roughly 9× delinquency over charge-off — stress mostly on the PDNA line, not the income statement.

Outside the bank book, CMBS office delinquencies near 11.3% and multifamily near 6.6% (December 2025 / FDIC Risk Review framing) still sit far above Call Report CRE averages. That gap is selection and structure, not a Fed data error — and it is unchanged as a qualitative ranking from the research map.

Where stress is rising: C&I and residential past-dues

Not every meter cooled. C&I charge-offs rose +0.04 pp YoY to 0.59%, with a matching +0.03 pp QoQ lift. C&I delinquency is +0.05 pp YoY at 1.34%, flat QoQ. That is mid-cycle drift, not a crisis print — but it is the clearest business-credit warming signal on the Fed SA table while consumer revolving credit cools.

Residential real estate delinquency jumped +0.12 pp YoY (and +0.10 pp QoQ) to 1.89%, while residential charge-offs remain ~0%. That is the classic lag geometry: past-dues can rise for quarters before net charge-offs move, because home equity, forbearance, and workout mechanics keep losses off the income statement. The stress map scatter still puts Resi mid-right and near the floor — high-ish delinquency, near-zero realized loss.

Pair the bank-side residential print with household-side color in our consumer finance markets update and household delinquency split: mortgage serious transitions remain low in absolute terms even as bank residential past-dues tick up. Two ledgers, one message — housing stress is visible earlier on delinquency than on write-offs.

Size, supply, and what the research map still gets right

This update does not restate the full FDIC size-cohort and CMBS property-type atlas — that lives in the research roll-up and the CRE size-split post. The vintage lens does not overturn those rankings: large banks still own the CRE past-due stock, mid-size banks still own CRE/capital density, and office still owns securitized stress.

What the SLOOS panel adds is supply color. Net tightening on CRE remains firmer than C&I into early 2026 — standards have eased from 2023 peaks but have not flipped to broad CRE easing. That fits a managed-stress regime: banks grow income-producing CRE carefully, shrink ADC exposure, and keep standards selective while past-dues stay elevated and charge-offs stay small.

How to read the 2026Q1 vintage for markets

Three practical takes follow from the deltas:

1. Income-statement stress is still consumer-led — and cooling. Card charge-offs at 3.84% dwarf CRE’s 0.17%, but the YoY path (−62 bp) says the worst of the revolving-credit loss spike is behind the industry for now.
2. Balance-sheet CRE stress is sticky, not accelerating. Delinquency near 1.56% with a ~9× multiple means markets should keep watching PDNA, modifications, and refinance wallsnot wait for a GFC-style charge-off spike that has not arrived.
3. The quiet warmers are C&I losses and residential past-dues. They are not the loudest headlines, but they are the meters moving against the cooling consumer print.

Caveats and methodology

1. Same vintage, different question. The research post and this update both sit on the Fed’s 2026Q1 SA close. This piece is a delta essay (YoY / QoQ), not a claim that a newer quarter has published.
2. Fed SA ≠ FDIC PDNA. Seasonally adjusted charge-off/delinquency rates are not identical to Call Report past-due-and-nonaccrual ratios. Levels can differ; direction usually rhymes.
3. CRE is a blend. Construction, multifamily, and nonfarm nonresidential move differently. Aggregate CRE delinquency understates office stress and overstates healthier industrial / owner-occupied books.
4. CMBS ≠ bank CRE. Securitized office and multifamily prints are a stressed subsample. Do not scale CMBS office delinquency onto the entire bank CRE book.
5. One QoQ CRE charge-off tick is not a cycle. The +3 bp move from 0.14% to 0.17% is real and disclosed; it is also small. Sustained conversion would need several quarters and a higher absolute level.
6. SLOOS mid-path points between survey anchors may be estimated; treat early-2026 tightening prints as directional.
7. Charge-offs are net of recoveries and annualized. Soft prints can reflect recoveries as well as lower gross losses.

Primary sources: Federal Reserve Charge-Off and Delinquency Rates (SA; update May 19, 2026 through 2026Q1); Federal Reserve Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey; FDIC 2026 Risk Review for CMBS / concentration context. Related reading: bank & commercial credit research, bank loan charge-offs, CRE delinquency by bank size.

What to watch next

Three coincident signals will tell you whether the cooling consumer print and sticky CRE past-dues remain a managed regime: (1) CRE charge-offs — another QoQ rise toward 0.25%+ would confirm conversion; (2) card charge-offs — whether the path stays below 4% or re-accelerates with labor softening; (3) C&I charge-offs — if the slow climb from 0.55% continues through mid-2026. Until those break, the live vintage answer is clear: cards cooled hard YoY, CRE past-dues did not, and the loss ledger is still a consumer story with a quieter CRE QoQ warning light.