Recent Trends in Credit Card Pricing

Aside from questions about the profitability of credit card operations, credit card pricing and how it has changed in recent years has been a focus of public attention and is consequently reviewed in this Report. Analysis of the trends in credit card pricing here focuses on credit card interest rates because they are the most important component of the pricing of credit card services. Credit card pricing, however, involves other elements, including annual fees, fees for cash advances and balance transfers, rebates, minimum finance charges, over-the-limit fees, and late payment charges.¹⁷ In addition, the length of the "interest-free" grace period, if any, can have an important influence on the amount of interest consumers pay when they use credit cards to generate revolving credit.

Over time, pricing practices in the credit card market have changed. Today card issuers offer a broad range of plans with differing rates depending on credit risk and consumer usage patterns. Risk-based pricing has become a central element of most credit card plan pricing regimes and the economic downturn and new credit card rules spurred changes in pricing in 2009 and 2010. In most plans, an issuer establishes a rate of interest for customers of a given risk profile; if the consumer borrows and pays within the terms of the plan, that rate applies. If the borrower fails to meet the plan requirements, for example, the borrower pays late or goes over their credit limit, the issuer may reprice the account reflecting the higher credit risk revealed by the new behavior. Regulations that became effective in February 2010 limit the ability of card issuers to reprice outstanding balances for cardholders that have not fallen at least 60 days behind on the payments on their accounts. Issuers may, however, reprice outstanding balances if they were extended under a variable-rate plan and the underlying index used to establish the rate of interest (such as the prime rate) changes. The new rules continue to provide issuers with considerable pricing flexibility regarding new balances.

This report relies on credit card pricing information obtained from the Quarterly Report of Credit Card Interest Rates (FR 2835a). This survey collects information from a sample of credit card issuers on (1) the average nominal interest rate and (2) the average computed interest rate. The former is the simple average interest rate posted across all accounts; the latter is the average interest rate paid by those cardholders that incur finance charges. These two measures can differ because some cardholders are convenience users who pay off their balances during the interest-free grace period and therefore do not typically incur finance charges. Together, these two interest rate series provide a measure of credit card pricing. The data are made available to the public each quarter in the Federal Reserve Statistical Release G.19 Consumer Credit.

Because information from the FR 2835a survey does not have an extended historical interest rate series for comparison purposes, this report also presents data from the survey that preceded and was replaced by the FR 2835a, the Federal Reserve's Quarterly Report of Interest Rates on Selected Direct Consumer Installment Loans (FR 2835). Data from the FR 2835a indicate that credit card interest rates fell sharply from mid-1991 through early 1994 after being relatively stable for most of the previous twenty years, and fell again over the 1998-2003 period (Table 2).¹⁸ Since early 1998, credit card interest rates have fluctuated between 12.78 and 15.85 percent.

It is important to note that while average rates paid by consumers have moved in a relatively narrow band over the past several years, interest rates charged vary considerably across credit card plans and borrowers reflecting the various features of the plans and the risk profile of the card holders served. For 2012, credit card interest rates averaged 12.96 percent for those incurring finance charges, down from 13.09 percent in 2011.¹⁹ It is important to note that as the recession emerged, spreads between issuers' cost of funds and prices charged on credit cards widened substantially, and have remained at elevated levels since then.