The latest asset-backed securities industry statistics show a $1.6 trillion US market, with year-to-date 2025 issuance up to $358 billion, a 16.8% increase over the prior year. The headline growth hides a sharper story underneath: auto-loan collateral is splitting into two credit regimes while a brand-new asset class built on AI data centers arrives.
Key Takeaways
- The US ABS market sits at roughly $1.6 trillion in size, a small share of the broader US fixed income market.
- Auto ABS led 2025 issuance at 34% of the total, reaching over $123 billion.
- Auto credit performance has diverged: prime auto ABS 30-plus-day delinquencies held around 1.9% in September 2025 while subprime climbed to 16%.
- Credit card ABS carries a cost of credit 200 basis points below the comparable bank book, a securitized-pool quality premium.
- Student-loan flow into serious delinquency of 90 days or more jumped from 0.80% to 12.88% between Q2 2024 and Q2 2025 as the federal payment pause expired.
- Data center ABS reached $11 billion across 23 deals in 2025, an emerging collateral class.
- Total US consumer credit, the collateral pool behind much of the ABS market, reached about $5.14 trillion by March 2026.
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- The US ABS market is valued at approximately $1.6 trillion.
- 2025 year-to-date ABS issuance hit $358 billion.
- Auto ABS issuance reached over $123 billion in 2025.
- Credit card ABS outstanding stands at $85 billion.
- Average daily ABS trading volume climbed to $2.15 billion, up 17%.
- An estimated $30-40 billion in data center ABS and CMBS is expected between 2026 and 2027.
Recent Developments
- September 2025: subprime auto loan ABS 30-plus-day delinquencies climbed to 16%, while prime auto held steady at 1.9%.
- October 2025: AAA-rated credit card ABS spreads sat at 32 basis points, stable over the prior two months.
- Q2 2025: aggregate bank auto lending for new and used vehicles totaled $523 billion, unchanged from a year earlier.
- Q2 2025: nonperforming auto loans eased to 2.26%, down from 2.50% a year earlier.
- Q1 2026: the credit card charge-off rate at commercial banks fell to 3.84% in the first quarter of 2026.
Asset-Backed Securities Market Size and Industry Statistics
- The US asset-backed securities market is valued at roughly $1.6 trillion.
- 2025 year-to-date issuance reached $358 billion, up 16.8% year over year.
- SIFMA tracks ABS issuance, trading, and outstanding across automobile, credit card, equipment, student loan, and other receivable sub-categories.
- Against the $47.8 trillion total US fixed income market, the ABS market represents roughly one-thirtieth of all outstanding US fixed income.
Asset-backed securities pool consumer and commercial loans, then sell the cash flows as tradable bonds. The underlying borrower-level rates that feed these pools include state-level auto loans and the credit risk scoring models that sort loans into prime versus subprime tranches.
| Metric | Value | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Total ABS market size | $1.6 trillion | 2025 |
| YTD issuance | $358 billion | 2025 |
| Issuance growth | +16.8% | Year over year |
| ABS share of US fixed income | ~3.4% | 2025 |
Source: SIFMA, IMF Global Markets Analysis
ABS Issuance by Segment
- Auto ABS represented 34% of total 2025 issuance, the largest single segment.
- Auto ABS issuance reached over $123 billion year to date.
- Prime auto segment issuance totaled approximately $9.7 billion in one recent window, with subprime at $1.2 billion.
- Credit card ABS issuance reached an estimated $18.4 billion year to date.
- Data center ABS issuance totaled $11 billion across 23 deals.
Auto loans remain the backbone of the consumer ABS market, and the segment proved resilient even after a subprime auto lender collapsed in early September 2025. Credit card receivables and the fast-emerging data center category round out the issuance mix. The same borrower segments that fill these pools also drive BNPL origination volumes, which increasingly compete with traditional revolving credit.
| Segment | 2025 Issuance | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| Auto ABS | $123 billion+ | 34% |
| Credit card ABS | $18.4 billion | Tracked separately |
| Data center ABS | $11 billion | Emerging class |
Source: IMF Global Markets Analysis, SIFMA
ABS Trading Volume and Liquidity
- Average daily ABS trading volume climbed to $2.15 billion in 2025, up 17%.
- The rising trading activity moved alongside the 16.8% jump in year-to-date issuance.
- SIFMA compiles ABS trading data in monthly, quarterly, and annual formats.
Secondary-market liquidity matters because it lets institutional investors rebalance ABS holdings without forcing fire sales during credit events. The 17% rise in daily volumes signals deepening investor participation across segments.
| Liquidity metric | Value | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Average daily trading volume | $2.15 billion | +17% |
| YTD issuance | $358 billion | +16.8% |
Source: SIFMA, IMF Global Markets Analysis
Auto Loan ABS Delinquency Trends
- Prime auto ABS 30-plus-day delinquencies held around 1.9% in September 2025.
- Subprime auto ABS 30-plus-day delinquency rates spiked to 16% in September 2025.
- Nonperforming bank auto loans, those 90 days past due or in nonaccrual, sat at 2.26% in Q2 2025.
- That nonperforming rate improved from 2.50% a year earlier.
Auto-loan credit is where ABS investors are watching most closely. Prime collateral remains stable, but subprime borrowers are showing clear stress, a debt-burden dynamic that runs parallel among the younger borrowers who dominate subprime auto pools.
| Auto ABS metric | Rate | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Prime 30+ day delinquency | 1.9% | September 2025 |
| Subprime 30+ day delinquency | 16% | September 2025 |
| Bank nonperforming auto loans | 2.26% | Q2 2025 |
| Bank nonperforming (prior year) | 2.50% | Q2 2024 |
Source: IMF Global Markets Analysis, FRED
Prime vs Subprime Auto ABS Divergence
- The auto ABS market showed a clear divergence between prime and subprime segments in late 2025.
- Subprime A-rated and BBB-rated auto ABS spreads widened the most over the prior month.
- Prime auto loan ABS collateral performance stayed stable at roughly 1.9% 30-plus-day delinquency.
The split matters because it tells investors the stress is concentrated, not systemic. Prime pools are holding while subprime tranches absorb the deterioration, which is exactly how the credit-quality tiering is designed to work.
By the numbers: Subprime auto ABS 30-plus-day delinquencies reached 16% by September 2025, more than eight times the roughly 1.9% prime rate in the same month, a gap of roughly 8.4x between the two credit tiers. The split shows credit stress concentrating in the weakest borrower pools while prime collateral holds, exactly the tiering that ABS structures are designed to deliver to investors.
| Tier | 30+ day delinquency | Spread behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Prime auto | 1.9% | Stable |
| Subprime auto | 16% | Widened most |
Source: IMF Global Markets Analysis
Credit Card ABS Performance
- Credit card ABS issuance reached an estimated $18.4 billion year to date, with total outstanding of $85 billion.
- The cost of credit on bank credit card portfolios runs 200 basis points higher than on credit card ABS pools.
- AAA-rated credit card ABS spreads stood at 32 basis points, stable over the prior two months.
- The commercial-bank credit card charge-off rate eased to 4.07% in Q4 2025.
- That rate fell further to 3.84% in Q1 2026, down from 4.64% in Q3 2024.
Credit card ABS pools hold higher-quality borrowers than the average bank book, which keeps spreads tight and ratings high. Issuer-level performance among premium-card portfolios such as American Express cardholder data illustrates the credit quality these securitized pools select for.
| Quarter | Card charge-off rate |
|---|---|
| Q3 2024 | 4.64% |
| Q4 2024 | 4.56% |
| Q1 2025 | 4.46% |
| Q2 2025 | 4.21% |
| Q3 2025 | 4.15% |
| Q4 2025 | 4.07% |
| Q1 2026 | 3.84% |
Source: Federal Reserve, FRED
Student Loan ABS Delinquencies
- Flow into serious delinquency of 90 days or more for student loan debt jumped from 0.80% in Q2 2024 to 12.88% in Q2 2025.
- That represents a 12.08 percentage point increase tied to the resumption of federal student loan reporting.
- Credit card debt serious-delinquency flow eased slightly from 7.18% to 6.93% over the same window.
- Private credit student ABS delinquencies stayed more stable than federal student loan ABS, though they are also inching up.
The student-loan jump reflects a policy-driven reporting change. When the federal payment pause expired, paused loans began re-reporting delinquencies that had been suppressed for years. The cohorts holding the largest balances in the student loans data feed federal student loan ABS pools most heavily.
Data Center ABS: The Newest Collateral Class
- Data center ABS issuance totaled $11 billion across 23 deals in 2025.
- Data center CMBS issuance totaled $8 billion over the same period.
- An estimated $30-40 billion in data center ABS and CMBS issuance is expected between 2026 and 2027.
- Data center single-A ABS traded at 140 basis points, after widening 5 basis points from a month earlier.
Key finding: Data center securitization, built on AI compute capacity, has moved from a niche idea to a measurable segment of the asset-backed securities market in a single year. With deal counts rising and a multi-year pipeline ahead, investors are now pricing hardware-obsolescence risk into a brand-new collateral class that did not exist at scale before 2025.
Data center securitization is the clearest sign that AI infrastructure is now a fundable asset class.
| Data center securitization | 2025 issuance | 2026-2027 pipeline |
|---|---|---|
| ABS | $11 billion (23 deals) | Part of $30-40 billion |
| CMBS | $8 billion | Part of $30-40 billion |
Source: IMF Global Markets Analysis, Bank of America and JPMorgan Research
ABS Within the US Fixed Income Market
- Total US fixed income outstanding reached $47.8 trillion in Q2 2025, up 5.5% year over year.
- US Treasuries led at $28.7 trillion, followed by corporate bonds at $11.4 trillion.
- Municipal bonds outstanding totaled $4.3 trillion and federal agency securities $2.07 trillion.
- Against that backdrop, the $1.6 trillion ABS market is roughly one-thirtieth of all US fixed income.
ABS is a smaller slice of fixed income than Treasuries or corporate bonds, but it is the segment most directly exposed to consumer-credit cycles, which makes it a useful gauge of household balance-sheet health.
Consumer Credit Backing ABS Collateral
- Total US consumer credit, owned and securitized, reached about $5.14 trillion by March 2026.
- Revolving consumer credit stood at about $1.34 trillion and nonrevolving at about $3.80 trillion.
- Motor vehicle loans, owned and securitized, totaled about $1.57 trillion at the end of 2024.
- Total consumer credit grew from about $4.95 trillion in December 2024 to about $5.14 trillion by March 2026.
The consumer-credit pool is the raw material for most consumer ABS, so growing balances expand the supply of securitizable loans.
Bank Auto Lending and Securitization
- Aggregate bank auto lending for new and used vehicles totaled $523 billion in Q2 2025.
- That figure was unchanged from a year earlier.
- Bank nonperforming auto loans improved to 2.26% in Q2 2025 from 2.50% a year before.
Banks originate auto loans and then securitize a share into ABS, so bank lending volume sets a ceiling on auto-ABS supply. State-level mortgage rate data shows a similar plateau in secured consumer lending.
| Bank auto lending | Value | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Aggregate balance | $523 billion | Q2 2025 |
| Year-over-year change | Unchanged | Q2 2024 to Q2 2025 |
| Nonperforming rate | 2.26% | Q2 2025 |
Source: IMF Global Markets Analysis, FRED
ABS Spreads Across Segments
- AAA-rated credit card ABS spreads held at 32 basis points, stable over the prior two months.
- Data center single-A ABS traded at 140 basis points.
- A-rated and BBB-rated subprime auto ABS spreads widened the most over the prior month.
Spreads map directly onto the credit narrative: tight card spreads, wide subprime auto spreads, and elevated data center spreads.
| Segment | Spread | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| AAA credit card ABS | 32 basis points | Stable |
| Single-A data center ABS | 140 basis points | Widened 5 bps |
| Subprime auto ABS | Widened most | Pressured |
Source: IMF Global Markets Analysis
What is the difference between ABS and MBS?
Asset-backed securities pool non-mortgage loans such as auto loans, credit card receivables, and student debt, while mortgage-backed securities pool home loans. Both turn loan cash flows into tradable bonds. ABS is the smaller market, at about $1.6 trillion versus the multi-trillion-dollar US MBS market.
What types of loans are securitized into asset-backed securities?
The main ABS collateral types are auto loans, credit card receivables, equipment leases, and student loans, the sub-categories SIFMA tracks across the US ABS market. Newer categories include data center leases, which reached $11 billion in 2025 issuance.
Conclusion
The US asset-backed securities market stands at roughly $1.6 trillion, with $358 billion in 2025 issuance, up 16.8%. Auto loans dominate the mix at 34% of issuance, but the segment is splitting, with prime delinquencies around 1.9% and subprime at 16%. Investors, issuers, and consumer-credit analysts all gain from watching these segment-level signals rather than the headline market size alone.
The data center category is the segment to watch. If the projected pipeline materializes through 2027, AI infrastructure could become one of the fastest-growing collateral classes in the ABS market.
