Californians have cooled their borrowings – and skipped more bill payments, two more signs of a stressful economy.

My trusty spreadsheet found these patterns within the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s third-quarter study of credit files . The data includes the size and payments of consumer debts in 11 big states and the nation through the September 2025 quarter. These statistics only consider individuals with credit histories — a sizable but not comprehensive segment of the population. Debt levels are tracked as an average per person.

According to this math, Californians had $87,570 in consumer debt per person in the third quarter, a 1.2% increase from the same period a year ago. That’s a cooling from 2.9% growth in the previous 12 months, and it’s below the 3%-a-year expansion pace

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