Among Updraft applicants over the 12 months to September 2026, the South East had the highest median card balance at £4,002, followed by the East of England at £3,988 and Scotland at £3,858. The lowest was the West Midlands at £3,464. The gap between highest and lowest is £538, or 15.5%.
Updraft’s latest research looks at the credit card debt people brought to us in each part of the UK, based on consolidation loan applications made in the year to September 2026. It compares balances by region and by postal area, and sets them against local income.
Overview
- By region, the South East had the highest median balance (£4,002) and the West Midlands the lowest (£3,464). That is a gap of just £538 (15.5%).
- Measured against average disposable income, the order changes. The median balance is 17.3% of yearly income per person in Northern Ireland and 10.4% in London, a spread of 67%.
- By postal area, the median card balance runs from £3,171 in Sunderland to £4,854 in Bromley, a gap of 53.1%.
- London sits at both ends. Bromley and Kingston upon Thames are in the top five postal areas in the UK, while Southall is in the bottom ten.
- This report presents the first regional breakdown of UK credit card balances we have found since 2017.
What we found
The UK looks more alike than it looks different
It would be easy to expect a map of regional credit card debt to show a sharp divide between lower and higher socioeconomic areas. This research suggests something closer to the opposite. The median balance runs from £3,464 in the West Midlands to £4,002 in the South East, a difference of £538. All twelve UK regions sit inside that band, a spread of 15.5% from top to bottom.
Against the UK median of £3,721, no region sits more than 7.6% above it or 6.9% below it. Seven of the twelve are within 5% of the median either way: Scotland, Northern Ireland, the South West, London, Wales, the East Midlands and the North West.
The pounds are only half the story, though. Set against what people in each region have to spend, the same balances are more than four times further apart.
Credit card balances across the UK
Show the figures by
Hover or tap a region. Click to pin.
The shading covers a narrow range, so small colour differences are small money differences.
Median card balance at application
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A year of interest on that—
Per month—
Share of yearly income—
Cards held, on average—
The median is the middle figure, so half the people in that region had a lower balance and half had a higher one. It describes people who came to Updraft, not the region as a whole. Share of yearly income divides it by the ONS average disposable income per person in that region for 2024.
Every region, highest balance first
Region by region
The table below shows the median credit card balance people brought us when they applied for an Updraft loan, and what that balance means against local income.
| Region | Median balance | Interest, one year | Per month | Share of yearly income | Weeks of income | Cards held |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South East | £4,002 | £858 | £71.54 | 13.5% | 7.0 | 6.26 |
| East of England | £3,988 | £855 | £71.29 | 14.9% | 7.7 | 6.35 |
| Scotland | £3,858 | £828 | £68.96 | 15.9% | 8.3 | 6.29 |
| Northern Ireland | £3,847 | £825 | £68.77 | 17.3% | 9.0 | 6.33 |
| South West | £3,804 | £816 | £67.99 | 14.7% | 7.6 | 6.25 |
| London | £3,777 | £810 | £67.51 | 10.4% | 5.4 | 6.01 |
| Wales | £3,618 | £776 | £64.67 | 16.9% | 8.8 | 6.39 |
| East Midlands | £3,578 | £768 | £63.97 | 15.7% | 8.2 | 6.21 |
| North West | £3,575 | £767 | £63.90 | 15.9% | 8.3 | 6.35 |
| North East | £3,512 | £753 | £62.77 | 17.1% | 8.9 | 6.38 |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | £3,503 | £751 | £62.62 | 16.0% | 8.3 | 6.24 |
| West Midlands | £3,464 | £743 | £61.92 | 15.7% | 8.2 | 6.18 |
Where balances sit highest
The three highest regions are the South East at £4,002, the East of England at £3,988 and Scotland at £3,858, sitting 7.6%, 7.2% and 3.7% above the UK median. The three lowest are the West Midlands at £3,464, Yorkshire and the Humber at £3,503 and the North East at £3,512, sitting 6.9%, 5.9% and 5.6% below it. Between the third highest and the third lowest there is £346, or 9.9%.
Zoom in and the country stops looking alike
When the map switches to postal areas, the median balance runs from £3,171 in Sunderland to £4,854 in Bromley. That gap of £1,683 is more than three times the £538 between regions.
Near the top sit Kingston upon Thames at £4,693, Chelmsford at £4,674 and West London at £4,542. At the lower end are Hull at £3,239, Wolverhampton at £3,254 and Dumfries at £3,256.
The two views of the same country differ by a factor of 3.4. Balances vary by 53.1% across the 113 postal areas against 15.5% across the twelve regions, and the standard deviation nearly doubles, from 4.9% to 8.7% of the mean. In yearly interest, the postal gap is £361 (£680 in Sunderland to £1,041 in Bromley), against £115 between the highest and lowest region.
The regional band hides a good deal. Of the 113 postal areas, 69 fall inside the £3,464 to £4,002 range that the regions occupy, 24 sit above the highest region and 20 sit below the lowest.
London shows this most clearly. Bromley and Kingston are among the five highest postal areas in the country, while East London at £3,383 and Southall at £3,282 sit in the lower part of the table. From Bromley to Southall is 48%, so London’s seventeen postal areas spread about three times as far as the whole UK does by region.
The same is true elsewhere. The West Midlands runs 38% from Hereford (£4,492) to Wolverhampton (£3,254), the East of England 37% from Chelmsford (£4,674) to Cambridge (£3,423), and Scotland 31% from Inverness (£4,272) to Dumfries (£3,256). Each of these is wider than the 15.5% between the country’s highest and lowest region. Wales runs the other way. Its four published postal areas, from Newport (£3,669) to Llandudno (£3,596), sit within 2.0% of each other.
| Area | Post town | Median balance | Interest, one year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ten highest | |||
| BR | Bromley | £4,854 | £1,041 |
| KT | Kingston upon Thames | £4,693 | £1,007 |
| CM | Chelmsford | £4,674 | £1,002 |
| W | West London | £4,542 | £974 |
| HR | Hereford | £4,492 | £964 |
| RH | Redhill | £4,463 | £957 |
| WD | Watford | £4,290 | £920 |
| IV | Inverness | £4,272 | £916 |
| GU | Guildford | £4,254 | £912 |
| HP | Hemel Hempstead | £4,229 | £907 |
| Ten lowest | |||
| BL | Bolton | £3,330 | £714 |
| L | Liverpool | £3,329 | £714 |
| B | Birmingham | £3,324 | £713 |
| BD | Bradford | £3,310 | £710 |
| UB | Southall | £3,282 | £704 |
| HX | Halifax | £3,262 | £700 |
| DG | Dumfries | £3,256 | £698 |
| WV | Wolverhampton | £3,254 | £698 |
| HU | Hull | £3,239 | £695 |
| SR | Sunderland | £3,171 | £680 |
Enfield (EN) also has a median of £4,229, level with Hemel Hempstead in tenth place.
The same balance weighs more in some regions
A larger balance usually comes with a larger credit limit, and limits tend to follow income. This data does not include credit limits, but outside London the balances fit that pattern. Regions with higher average incomes carry higher median balances, and the two rise and fall closely together. The top of the balance table, then, says more about how much credit was on offer than about how well anyone is managing it.
Dividing each region’s median balance by what the average person there has to spend changes the picture. The ONS puts gross disposable household income at £36,487 per person in London in 2024 and £20,562 in the North East, against a UK average of £25,965. Those incomes are 77% apart, while the balances are 15.5% apart.
The result is that balances look similar in pounds and very different in weight:
- In London the median balance is 10.4% of average yearly disposable income per person, or about 5.4 weeks of it.
- In the South East it is 13.5%, or 7.0 weeks.
- In the North East it is 17.1%, or 8.9 weeks.
- In Northern Ireland it is 17.3%, or 9.0 weeks.
From the lightest (London) to the heaviest (Northern Ireland), the spread is 66%. That is more than four times the 15.5% spread in the balances themselves.
London is the exception to the pattern. It has the highest income of any region by a wide margin but sits sixth by balance. With London included, the link between income and balance across the regions is much weaker than without it.
These figures compare people who applied to Updraft with the average for everyone in their region, including children and retired people. They do not show that anyone in this data earns the regional average, and they do not show that one region is poorer than another. What they do show is that the same median balance sits against very different local incomes.
Cards held, and cards left unused
The number of cards people hold barely changes across the country. Applicants averaged between 6.01 cards (London) and 6.39 (Wales), a spread of 6.3%, which is less than the spread in balances. Between 4.74 and 4.87 of those cards were active in every region.
That leaves between 1.23 inactive cards per person in London and 1.53 in Wales.
The rate does not change with your postcode
Lenders price credit cards on credit risk rather than address, so the yearly cost of carrying a balance moves only with the size of the balance. At the Bank of England’s July 2026 average rate of 21.45%, that runs from £743 in the West Midlands to £858 in the South East.
That is a difference of £115 a year between the most and least expensive region to carry a card balance, or about £9.62 a month. The regional table above gives the figure for every region, and our pay off calculator works out the cost for a balance of your own.
A note about Northern Ireland
Most UK debt research covers Great Britain and stops there. Northern Ireland is in this research, with 13,900 applications behind it.
By balance alone, Northern Ireland is fourth from the top at £3,847, 3.4% above the UK median and £383 above the West Midlands. Against income it moves to first. The median balance there is 17.3% of average yearly disposable income per person, the highest share of any region.
This matters because the last public regional breakdown put Northern Ireland lowest in the UK. Our figures come from a different group of people, but they suggest that the 2017 picture should not be carried forward to 2026.
If your balance is becoming hard to manage
This research cannot say what anyone should do with their own cards, and the right answer depends on your position. The sums above give one point to weigh. At 21.45%, each £1,000 of card balance costs about £215 a year in interest if it stays flat.
If keeping up with payments is becoming hard, free and confidential debt advice is available across the UK. MoneyHelper’s debt advice locator finds a service for where you live, and GOV.UK lists free debt advice services by phone and online.
The public data stops in 2017
The most recent regional breakdown of UK credit card borrowing in the public record comes from the Office for National Statistics, using Equifax credit data, and it stops at the end of 2017. We have not found a more recent regional split of card balances. Our figures are from 2026, so they cover ground the 2017 data no longer reaches.
Those ONS figures put card borrowing at £976 to £1,493 per adult, depending on the region. The figures in this research are several times higher, and that is to be expected. Region by region, our medians run between 2.6 and 3.9 times the 2017 per-adult figures, averaging 3.1 times, with London closest at 2.6 and Northern Ireland furthest at 3.9. Everyone in this data came to Updraft to deal with debt, so they are likely to carry more card debt than the population at large. The data represents our applicants, not the country.
A lot has also happened in nine years. The UK left the EU in January 2020, the pandemic arrived within weeks, and energy and food prices climbed from late 2021. The Consumer Prices Index stood at 104.9 in December 2017 and 143.6 in August 2026, a rise of 36.9%. Put another way, £100 in 2017 buys about £73 of the same goods now, and the same is true of a card balance.
Borrowing on cards has grown too. The Bank of England put the annual growth rate of credit card borrowing at 12.5% in July 2026, and 12.3% in January, against 9.2% for consumer credit as a whole. Carrying that borrowing has stayed expensive. The effective rate on interest-charging cards was 21.75% in January 2026 and 21.45% by July.
A national price index cannot show which regions took the strain of these events. The country has been through a great deal since the last regional count, but we cannot measure where the pressure hit hardest.
Compared with the ONS figures, our data agrees at the top and parts company at the bottom. The South East led both datasets. Northern Ireland was lowest in 2017 and is fourth from the top here, which is a reminder that the two count different groups of people rather than the same group at two points in time.
Method and sources
What we measured
The total credit card balance on the applicant’s credit file at the point they applied to Updraft. We report the median across everyone in each area with a balance above zero. Credit card debt here means total debt on credit cards, store cards, charge cards and budget accounts.
Who is in it
Every application made to Updraft in the 12 months to 11 September 2026, which is 550,644 applications. We used applicants rather than funded customers, because that group is not shaped by our own lending decisions.
How regions were assigned
From the postcode area, meaning the letters before the first digit, mapped to the twelve UK regions and countries. Postcode areas do not follow region boundaries exactly, so a small number of people who live near a boundary fall into the neighbouring region. 7,721 records had no readable postcode, 127 were from the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, and 14 had a postcode area that belongs to no UK region, mostly British Forces (BFPO) addresses. We excluded all three groups. No region in this research rests on fewer than 13,900 applications.
How postal areas were assigned
The postal area is the letters at the start of a postcode, before the first digit, and it takes the name of its main post town. There are 121 in this data. We report the 113 with at least 1,000 applications behind them, which covers 539,924 of the applications in the study. The eight left out are Harrogate, Outer Hebrides, Shetland, Llandrindod Wells, West Central London, City of London, Kirkwall and Galashiels, all of which are small in this data. They are grey on the map.
Postal area boundaries on the map come from Rob Lascelles’ uk-postcode-map dataset. That file covers Great Britain, so the Belfast area, which covers the whole of Northern Ireland, uses the Northern Ireland outline from the regional map.
The yearly cost figure
Median balance multiplied by 21.45% over twelve months, with the balance held flat. That rate is the Bank of England effective rate on interest-charging credit cards for July 2026, which is the rate people actually pay on balances they hold rather than an advertised headline rate.
Share of income and weeks of income
Each region’s median balance divided by the ONS figure for gross disposable household income (GDHI) per head in that region for 2024. Weeks of income is the median balance divided by one fifty-second of that figure. GDHI per head is the money available to spend or save after taxes and benefits, averaged across every resident, including children and retired people. The ONS labels these figures official statistics in development, and the 2024 estimates are provisional. ONS regions match our twelve regions one to one.
Across all twelve regions, the correlation between median balance and GDHI per head is 0.57. Without London it is 0.84. Twelve regions is a small number of points, so treat these as a description of the pattern rather than a test of it.
What this does not show
- It is not a picture of the UK population. Everyone here approached a lender about credit card debt.
- It does not show arrears, missed payments or financial difficulty.
- The income comparison uses the average for everyone in a region, not the income of the people in this data.
- It does not show whether a balance sits on a 0% deal.
- It does not show the rate any individual was paying on their own cards.
Sources
- Updraft application records, 12 months to 11 September 2026, data as at 11 September 2026. Grouped to region and postal area, no individual records used.
- Office for National Statistics, Regional gross disposable household income, UK: 1997 to 2024, published 19 August 2026, Table 1. GDHI per head by region, 2024 (provisional). ons.gov.uk
- Bank of England, Money and Credit, July 2026, published 1 September 2026. Effective rate on interest-charging credit cards 21.45%, credit card borrowing annual growth 12.5%, consumer credit 9.2%. bankofengland.co.uk
- Bank of England, Money and Credit, January 2026, published 2 March 2026. Credit card borrowing annual growth 12.3%, effective rate 21.75%.
- Office for National Statistics, Enhanced financial accounts (UK flow of funds), using Equifax data to visualise patterns of borrowing across the UK, published 30 January 2019, Figure 6. Credit, store and charge cards, pounds per person aged 18 and over, end of 2017. ons.gov.uk
- Office for National Statistics, Consumer price inflation, UK: August 2026, published 16 September 2026. CPI index (2015=100) 104.9 in December 2017, 143.6 in August 2026.
- MoneyHelper (Money and Pensions Service), Debt advice locator, accessed 28 September 2026. moneyhelper.org.uk
- GOV.UK, Get free debt advice, accessed 28 September 2026. gov.uk
- Postal area boundaries from uk-postcode-map by Rob Lascelles. github.com/roblascelles/uk-postcode-map
- Region boundaries from Office for National Statistics European Electoral Region and Northern Ireland Local Government District files, published under the Open Government Licence and redistributed as GeoJSON by Martin Chorley. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. github.com/martinjc/UK-GeoJSON
Reuse
Journalists and researchers are welcome to use these figures with credit to Updraft. The regional table is published in full above, so every number in this research can be checked.
Final Thought
Looking to pay off credit card debt? If you’re looking to consolidate credit card debt and cut down on high interest, check your eligibility for Updraft, or download our app today.
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Frequently asked questions
Which UK region has the highest credit card debt?
Which region has the highest credit card debt compared with income?
Northern Ireland. The median balance there is 17.3% of average yearly disposable income per person, followed by the North East at 17.1% and Wales at 16.9%. London has the lowest share at 10.4%. Income figures are ONS gross disposable household income per head for 2024.
Which postal area has the highest credit card debt?
Among Updraft applicants, Bromley had the highest median card balance of any UK postal area at £4,854, followed by Kingston upon Thames at £4,693 and Chelmsford at £4,674. The lowest was Sunderland at £3,171, with Hull at £3,239 and Wolverhampton at £3,254 close behind. The gap of £1,683 is more than three times the gap between regions.
Does credit card interest vary by region in the UK?
No. UK lenders price credit cards on a person's credit risk, not their address, so there is no regional APR. What varies between regions is the size of the balance people carry. The Bank of England put the average rate on interest-charging credit cards at 21.45% in July 2026.
Is this the average for everyone in the UK?
No. These figures describe people who applied to Updraft to consolidate credit card debt, so they carry considerably more card debt than the UK population. For a population figure, the most recent regional data is from the Office for National Statistics using Equifax records, which put card borrowing at £976 to £1,493 per adult at the end of 2017.
How much does it cost to carry a card balance for a year?
At the Bank of England's July 2026 average rate of 21.45%, a balance of £3,464 costs about £743 in interest over twelve months if it stays where it is, and a balance of £4,002 costs about £858. Balances move from month to month, so treat these as the running cost at today's rate rather than a bill anyone receives.
How many credit cards do people have?
Updraft applicants held between 6.01 and 6.39 cards on average, depending on the region, with between 4.74 and 4.87 of them active. The figure barely moves across the UK.