Korea's credit stress is in companies, not households
Bank loan delinquency, Dec 2023 to Jul 2026: corporate loans went 0.4% to 0.8%, a doubling. Household loans went 0.3% to 0.4%. The series everyone writes about is the one that moved least.
AI-assisted, human-reviewed sourcing. Figures are pulled programmatically from the official sources listed at the end of this article and checked by an editor before publication.
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Search for Korean credit in English and you will find household debt. The ₩2,000-trillion total, the debt-to-GDP rank, the warnings. It is a real number and we have written about it.
But the Bank of Korea publishes a monthly delinquency series split three ways, and over the last thirty-two months the line that moved is not the household one.
The three lines
Bank loan delinquency, one month or more overdue:
| Month | Corporate | Household | Credit-card |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-12 | 0.4% | 0.3% | 1.6% |
| 2024-06 | 0.5% | 0.4% | 1.7% |
| 2024-12 | 0.5% | 0.4% | 1.9% |
| 2025-06 | 0.6% | 0.4% | 1.9% |
| 2025-12 | 0.6% | 0.4% | 1.6% |
| 2026-07 | 0.8% | 0.4% | 1.9% |
From 2023-12 to 2026-07:
- Corporate loans: 0.4% → 0.8%. That is a 2.00x move, and it is the highest reading in the series.
- Household loans: 0.3% → 0.4%. One reported step, with a peak of 0.5% in 2025-05.
- Credit-card loans: 1.6% → 1.9%. The highest level of the three throughout, but below its 2.3% peak of 2025-02.
Households are the story everyone writes. Corporates are the line that doubled.
Why the gap is easy to miss
Household debt is a stock story — the total is enormous and it keeps rising, so there is always a number to put in a headline. Delinquency is a behaviour story: it only moves when borrowers stop paying.
Korean households, on this measure, have not stopped paying. Korean companies, on this measure, increasingly have — from a very low base, to a level that is still low in absolute terms. 0.8% is not a crisis number. Doubling in under three years is still the fastest-moving thing in the table.
What this does not say
- Banks only. This table is domestic bank lending. The non-bank lenders — mutual credit cooperatives, savings banks, card issuers’ own books — are not here, and historically that is where Korean credit stress appears first. We cannot see them in this series and we are not going to infer them.
- One month overdue is early, not final. It is not a write-off rate. Some of it cures.
- One decimal place. ECOS reports these rounded, so a 0.4-to-0.5 move is a single reported step. We have not tried to read anything finer.
- The series starts in 2023-12. It cannot be compared to 2008 or 2020 from this table, and we did not splice a different series onto it to pretend otherwise.
- There is no sector, firm-size or region split in this table. We looked.
On the stock rather than the repayment: Korea’s household debt quadrupled in 24 years and who holds it barely changed, and the mortgage gap between men and women that went from 1.3% to 14.0%.
Figures are from the Bank of Korea’s ECOS statistical service, table 901Y124, retrieved 2026-10-04. Not investment advice.
Data & Verification Notes
- Data as of
- Sources
- Bank of Korea (ECOS) — Table 901Y124, domestic bank loan delinquency rate (one month or more overdue), monthly 2023-12 to 2026-07, items corporate loans / household loans / credit-card loans, unit percent; retrieved 2026-10-04
- Cross-checks
- Corporate loans: 0.4 percent in 2023-12, peak 0.8 percent in 2025-05, 0.8 percent in 2026-07
- Household loans: 0.3 percent in 2023-12, peak 0.5 percent in 2025-05, 0.4 percent in 2026-07
- Credit-card loans: 1.6 percent in 2023-12, peak 2.3 percent in 2025-02, 1.9 percent in 2026-07
- Ratio of end to start: corporate 2.00x, household 1.33x, credit-card 1.19x
- The series runs 32 monthly observations
- Excluded figures
- This is domestic bank lending only. Non-bank lenders — mutual credit cooperatives, savings banks, card companies' own books — are not in this table, and that is where Korean credit stress has historically shown first
- Delinquency of one month or more is an early measure, not a loss measure. It says nothing about recovery or write-offs
- ECOS publishes these to one decimal place. A move from 0.4 to 0.5 is one reported step, and we have not tried to read anything finer than that
- The series starts in 2023-12. We cannot compare this to the 2008 or 2020 cycles from this table, and we did not splice another series onto it to pretend we could
- No sector, firm-size or region split is in table 901Y124. We looked
- This is not investment advice
The full dataset behind these figures — every listed company, every row — is available to license. SeoulMarkets data for licence →
Not investment advice. SMarkets publishes data journalism for general information only. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security — any investment you make is at your own risk and responsibility. Figures are derived from official public data sources and may be revised by the issuing agency. Verify independently before acting.
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