Rent payments are slipping, and lenders are starting to notice

Moderate earners moved the number

Renters at the bottom of the income scale still had the most trouble, with 27.8% reporting a late or partial payment. The growth, though, came from households earning between 2 and 4 times the federal poverty line. For one adult, that's about $31,300 to $62,600 a year. For a household of three, about $53,300 to $106,600. In 2024, 14.3% of these renters reported a rent problem. In 2025, 21.6% did.

The top of the scale saw movement too. Roughly 7% of renters with the highest incomes paid late or partially in 2025, the highest share for that group since 2019, though it’s important to note that Urban Institute found the change too small to be statistically significant.

From the unit to the loan

When rent comes in late, the owner's mortgage payment doesn't wait. Freddie Mac's August 2026 data put 0.64% of its multifamily loans at 60 or more days delinquent. In July it was 0.60%, and in August 2025 it was 0.48%. For comparison, the August 2011 figure, in the aftermath of the housing crash, was 0.35%. The upswing began in February.

Securitized apartment loans point the same way. Trepp's August data shows 7.69% of multifamily CMBS loans delinquent, unchanged from July. In March, the rate had already passed its previous high of 7.12%, set in October 2025.

Trepp ties newly troubled loans to a mix of factors: weaker occupancy, higher costs to run buildings, and cooling demand in certain markets. All three eat into net operating income. The revenue side of that equation gets shaped long before a loan payment is due, at the moment an application is approved.

Rethinking what a good applicant looks like

Many operators approve renters with a fixed income multiple and a credit threshold. Those rules assume income on an application is a fair stand-in for future payment. Urban's numbers complicate that. Depending on rent levels, plenty of households in the 2 to 4 times poverty band would clear a typical income requirement, and that's the group where late and partial payments grew most. Gross pay on an application doesn't show a utility bill that keeps climbing or a grocery budget that's stretched thin.

Raising income minimums or tightening criteria won't fix this. Stricter rules turn away renters who would have paid, and every unit left empty is its own kind of loss. What operators need is a clearer read on which applicants keep paying long after move-in.

Findigs was built for that question. Our decisioning platform returns a yes or no on every application, informed by post-lease performance data, meaning how residents Findigs has approved actually pay over time, rather than one income ratio. Operators using Findigs have reduced bad debt by as much as 60%. More full units, and more rent collected from them, even in a year when household budgets are tight.

Get to occupancy that pays.

Sources

• Urban Institute, “Renters Increasingly Struggle to Pay for Housing” (September 2026)
• Multifamily Dive, Urban Institute renter findings
• Multifamily Dive, “Multifamily CMBS servicing rate declined, delinquencies stayed flat in August: Trepp”
• Multifamily Dive, “Multifamily delinquencies jumped 30 bps in March, as property-level fundamentals deteriorate: Trepp”
• Freddie Mac multifamily serious delinquency figures as reported by CDM
• Findigs, bad debt reduction