Private Credit Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Mia Scarlett, Business & Capital Markets | Last updated: September 2, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Global private credit lending stood between $1.5 trillion and $2.0 trillion at end-2024, according to the Financial Stability Board. That half-trillion-dollar range is not a rounding convention. It is the actual width of what the world’s financial regulators can measure — and Axis Intelligence Research finds the same dispersion runs through default rates, leverage, and bank exposure.
Quick Answer
Private credit is a $1.5–2.0 trillion global market, with the United States accounting for roughly $1 trillion of it, per the Financial Stability Board’s May 2026 report on vulnerabilities in private credit. Reported default rates for the same market and the same period range from 2.51% (Proskauer’s Private Credit Default Index, Q2 2026) to 6.0% (Fitch Ratings, twelve months to April 2026) — a 2.39-fold spread. Axis Intelligence Research calculates the Private Credit Opacity Index (PCOI) at 42.2 out of 100 as of September 2, 2026, and puts the total dollar value of contested measurement in the asset class at $780 billion.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that $780 billion of private credit activity sits inside measurement disagreements — $500 billion in the FSB’s own market-size range and $280 billion in the gap between regulator-collected and commercially-estimated bank exposure to private credit funds.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds the private credit default rate is measured 2.39 times higher by its broadest published gauge than by its narrowest: Fitch Ratings reported 6.0% for the twelve months to April 2026, while Proskauer’s Private Credit Default Index reported 2.51% for Q2 2026.
- Axis Intelligence Research’s Private Credit Opacity Index reads 42.2 on a 0–100 scale in its baseline September 2026 reading, meaning that across market size, bank exposure, defaults, and borrower leverage, credible published measurements of the same quantity differ by an average of 42% of the larger figure.
- According to the Financial Stability Board (May 2026), private credit borrower leverage runs 5–6x debt-to-EBITDA on reported figures but closer to 7x once structural EBITDA add-backs are stripped out — Axis Intelligence Research calculates that 21.4% of true borrower leverage is invisible in headline numbers.
- According to the Financial Stability Board (May 2026), retail investors’ share of US private credit assets under management climbed from effectively zero to roughly 13% over the past decade, while approximately 20% of euro area private credit funds are open-ended and about 75% of those permit monthly or more frequent redemptions.
How Big Is the Private Credit Market in 2026?
The honest answer is that nobody knows within half a trillion dollars, and the institutions closest to the data say so in print.
The FSB’s assessment, drawing on regulatory reporting from Canada, the euro area, Hong Kong, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, puts global private credit — defined narrowly as nonbank direct lending to medium-sized companies negotiated bilaterally — at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion as of end-2024. On that measure private credit is roughly the size of the institutional leveraged loan market ($1.5–1.7 trillion) and slightly smaller than the roughly $2 trillion US high-yield bond market.
The Federal Reserve’s own staff estimate, published in a May 2025 FEDS Note on bank lending to private credit, put the US market at $1.34 trillion and the global market at nearly $2 trillion as of Q2 2024, having grown roughly fivefold since 2009. The FSB’s own US figure is around $1 trillion. Two official-sector bodies, one asset class, a $340 billion difference in the American market alone.
| Measure | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global private credit, low bound | $1.5 trillion | End-2024 | FSB, Report on Vulnerabilities in Private Credit (2026) |
| Global private credit, high bound | $2.0 trillion | End-2024 | FSB (2026) |
| United States market | ~$1.0 trillion | End-2024 | FSB (2026) |
| United States market | $1.34 trillion | Q2 2024 | Federal Reserve, FEDS Notes (2025) |
| Institutional leveraged loan market | $1.5–1.7 trillion | 2025 | FSB (2026), citing FRB Financial Stability Report |
| US high-yield bond market | ~$2.0 trillion | 2024 | FSB (2026) |
| Euro area private debt funds (NAV) | €337 billion | 2024 | ESRB NBFI Monitor, via FSB (2026) |
Growth Rates by Jurisdiction
Growth is where the picture sharpens, because rates of change survive definitional disputes better than levels do. FSB member survey responses put average annual private credit growth over the past five years at 16% in Canada and 17% in the United Kingdom. The euro area averaged 13% a year over the past decade from a low base. The United States has seen a threefold increase since 2019.
Mia Scarlett, Business & Capital Markets: Strip out the adjectives and this is a straightforward capital-formation story with one unusual feature. Every other credit market of this size has a tape. The leveraged loan market has index membership and daily marks. High yield has CUSIPs. Private credit has a fiduciary obligation to disclose to its limited partners and no obligation to disclose to anyone else — which is exactly the arrangement its investors bought. The measurement problem is not a flaw in the market. It is a design specification, and it has a price that shows up later.
What Is the Private Credit Default Rate in 2026?
This is the single most contested number in the asset class, and the dispersion is not noise. It is definitional.
Proskauer’s Private Credit Default Index, which tracks US senior-secured and unitranche loans, reported 2.51% for Q2 2026 across 716 loans representing $195.6 billion in original principal — down from 2.73% in Q1 2026. Fitch Ratings, applying a broader definition that captures distressed exchanges and maturity extensions, reported a US private credit default rate of 6.0% for the twelve months to April 2026, a record for the series, and held it at 6.0% through May 2026.
The FSB reconciles the two in a single sentence: outright loan defaults remain at approximately 1%, but the figure rises to around 5% once selective defaults — restructurings executed on non-arm’s-length terms — are included.
Proskauer Index: Eight Quarters of Direction
| Quarter | Default rate | Change vs prior quarter | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q2 2025 | 1.76% | — | Proskauer Private Credit Default Index |
| Q3 2025 | 1.84% | +0.08 pp | Proskauer |
| Q4 2025 | 2.46% | +0.62 pp | Proskauer |
| Q1 2026 | 2.73% | +0.27 pp | Proskauer |
| Q2 2026 | 2.51% | −0.22 pp | Proskauer |
From Q3 2025 to Q2 2026 the index rose 36.4% in relative terms, from 1.84% to 2.51%. That is the direction; the level is what people argue about.
Defaults by Borrower Size, Q2 2026
| Borrower EBITDA band | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Less than $25 million | 2.3% | 1.9% | Proskauer Private Credit Default Index |
| $25 million – $49.9 million | 3.1% | 3.4% | Proskauer |
| $50 million or more | 3.0% | 2.4% | Proskauer |
The core middle market — borrowers with EBITDA between $25 million and $49.9 million — is the only band moving the wrong way. It is also the band with the least public reporting and the fewest rating-agency eyes on it.
KBRA’s Q4 2025 Middle Market Borrower Surveillance Compendium, covering 2,416 unique globally sponsored middle-market borrowers representing over $1 trillion of private direct lending debt, put its forward-looking Middle Market Default Monitor at 81 companies over the trailing twelve months — 17 in payment default and 64 assessed at ccc-. That ratio matters more than the headline: for every borrower that has actually missed a payment, nearly four are being held out of default by sponsor or lender intervention.
Mia Scarlett: A default rate that requires you to specify which definition you are using is not a default rate. It is a menu. Proskauer counts a missed payment, a distressed restructuring, a breached financial covenant, or a modification made in anticipation of default. Fitch counts distressed exchanges and duress-driven maturity extensions. Both are defensible. Neither is wrong. But an allocator who quotes 2.51% and a supervisor who quotes 6.0% are describing the same portfolio, and only one of them is going to be surprised.
The Axis Private Credit Opacity Index (PCOI)
Every discussion above collapses into the same structure: two credible institutions measure one quantity and disagree. Axis Intelligence Research built the Private Credit Opacity Index (PCOI) to put a single number on that condition.
What PCOI Measures
PCOI is a 0–100 composite. It does not measure risk, distress, or credit quality. It measures how far apart the best available published measurements of the same quantity sit — the width of the disagreement, not the direction. A reading of 0 would mean every credible source agrees to the decimal. A reading of 100 would mean the lower estimate is zero.
Formula and Weights
For each component, the dispersion ratio is:
D = (High estimate − Low estimate) ÷ High estimate × 100
PCOI = 0.30·D(size) + 0.25·D(bank exposure) + 0.30·D(defaults) + 0.15·D(leverage)
Component Inputs and Reading, September 2, 2026
| # | Component | Low estimate | High estimate | Dispersion D | Weight | Contribution | Input source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Market size | $1.5 trillion | $2.0 trillion | 25.00 | 0.30 | 7.50 | FSB (2026) |
| 2 | Bank exposure to private credit funds | $220 billion | $500 billion | 56.00 | 0.25 | 14.00 | FSB (2026) |
| 3 | US default rate | 2.51% | 6.00% | 58.17 | 0.30 | 17.45 | Proskauer Q2 2026; Fitch Ratings, April 2026 |
| 4 | Borrower leverage (debt/EBITDA) | 5.5x | 7.0x | 21.43 | 0.15 | 3.21 | FSB (2026), citing UBS Credit Research |
| PCOI | 1.00 | 42.16 | Axis Intelligence Research |
PCOI = 42.2 (baseline reading, as of September 2, 2026.)
Arithmetic was verified in two independent passes, floating-point and exact rational. A competent outsider can recompute this reading from the four input pairs above.
Weighting Rationale
Size and defaults carry 30% each because they are the two figures external parties actually quote — a market-size number in a pitch deck, a default rate in a risk committee. Bank exposure carries 25% because it is the transmission channel to the regulated sector, and because its dispersion is the widest of the four. Leverage carries 15% because the gap there is the best-documented and least contested of the set: both the reported and the adjusted figures come from the same analytical source.
Scope
PCOI captures dispersion among published estimates. It does not capture quantities that nobody has attempted to measure at all, which by definition produce a dispersion of zero and would flatter the index. It says nothing about whether the high or the low estimate is correct. It is a US-and-global composite and is not calculated per jurisdiction. The methodology is fixed at this baseline; any future change to components or weights will be disclosed and re-baselined, and historical readings will not be silently restated.
The Dollar Version: A $780 Billion Measurement Gap
Two of the four components are denominated in dollars, and they add:
- Market-size gap: $2.0 trillion − $1.5 trillion = $500 billion
- Bank-exposure gap: $500 billion − $220 billion = $280 billion
- Total: $780 billion
Axis Intelligence Research states this as an estimate of contested measurement, not an estimate of hidden or unrecorded lending. The two components are not additive as exposures — they measure different things — but they are additive as a statement about what credible institutions cannot agree on.
How Exposed Are Banks to Private Credit?
Not very, and nobody is sure. The FSB reports that data collected directly from member authorities captures roughly $220 billion of drawn and undrawn credit lines from banks to private credit funds, while commercial datasets suggest the figure could be more than twice as large — around $270 billion to $500 billion. Where private credit lending could be separately identified, aggregate bank exposures came to less than 0.5% of total bank assets.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s analysis placed global bank lending to private credit funds at approximately $268 billion as of end-2023, with individual banking groups showing a median exposure of 0.2% of total assets and a maximum of 4.4%. Private-sector analysis using US public filings runs higher: roughly $300 billion of drawn loans at the largest banks, a further $155 billion in undrawn commitments, and $91 billion in lending by US branches of European banks.
Bank Facility Pricing to Private Credit Vehicles
| Facility type | Tenor | Pricing over benchmark | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription line | 1–3 years | ~200 bps | FSB member survey, Q3 2025 |
| Fund portfolio financing | — | ~225 bps | FSB member survey, Q3 2025 |
| NAV financing | 3–5 years | ~200–400 bps | FSB member survey, Q3 2025 |
| Loans to BDCs (revolvers) | — | ~230 bps | FSB (2026), citing Chernenko, Ialenti & Scharfstein |
| Private credit CLO senior tranches | 2–5 years | ~350 bps | FSB (2026), ICE BofA AAA index basis |
Concentration Is the Real Exposure Story
The market for bank lending to business development companies is more concentrated than non-BDC lending. The top 5 banks account for 63% of total committed loan amounts to BDCs; the top 10 account for about 84%. The average BDC maintains borrowing relationships with 5.5 banks. Up to 90% of bank lending to BDCs takes the form of credit lines, which BDCs draw on frequently.
On the manager side, the IMF’s October 2025 assessment found that five large asset management groups account for roughly one-third of aggregate loan commitments across the entire private credit and private equity industry.
Mia Scarlett: Half a percent of bank assets is a number designed to end a conversation. The number that should start one is 63% — the share of committed BDC lending sitting with five institutions. Aggregate exposure tells you the size of the loss if everything goes wrong everywhere. Concentration tells you how many phone calls it takes for a funding market to close. Those are different questions, and only one of them has a small answer.
Who Borrows From Private Credit, and How Leveraged Are They?
Private credit borrowers cluster tightly around the single-B rating bucket, in contrast to leveraged loans and high-yield bonds, which span a wider range. Fitch’s Q3 2025 monitor found that roughly 75% of private credit borrowers have EBITDA below $100 million. The largest borrowing sectors are services, technology and healthcare.
Reported leverage runs 5–6x debt-to-EBITDA, against approximately 4x in the broadly syndicated loan market. But the FSB, citing UBS Credit Research, notes that growing use of EBITDA add-backs means true leverage is likely closer to 7x. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that this puts 21.4% of actual borrower leverage outside the headline figure — computed as (7.0 − 5.5) ÷ 7.0, using the midpoint of the reported range.
Payment-in-Kind: The Early-Warning Metric
| Metric | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of private credit loans using PIK | ~12% | 2025 | FSB (2026), via S&P Global Ratings / Lincoln International |
| Share of PIK cases that are toggles | ~50% | 2025 | FSB (2026) |
| PIK toggles as share of all loans (calculated) | ~6% | 2025 | Axis Intelligence Research |
| Added delinquency probability from PIK toggle, next quarter | +1 to +2 pp | 2025 | Rintamaki & Steffen (2025), via FSB |
| Unconditional quarterly delinquency probability | ~3% | 2025 | Rintamaki & Steffen (2025), via FSB |
| MM CLO borrowers with cash flow insufficient to cover interest | ~10% | Q3 2025 | S&P Global Ratings, via FSB |
A PIK toggle raises the probability of a loan turning delinquent next quarter by one to two percentage points against an unconditional base of about 3% — an increase of roughly a third to two-thirds in relative terms. Use of both PIK notes and PIK toggles has risen sharply since 2022 and has not turned down.
Private Credit CLOs, Retail Money, and Redemption Pressure
The Private Credit CLO Market
The private credit CLO market — also called middle-market CLOs — reached an estimated $155 billion outstanding as of October 2025, which is 15.9% of the $977 billion US CLO market on Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation. These structures carry a higher proportion of CCC-rated loans and weaker recovery rates than traditional broadly syndicated CLOs, but also larger equity tranches (typically 30–40% in the middle-market bank-financing structures the FSB describes) and a significantly lower share of covenant-lite loans. Issuers often retain the entire equity tranche.
Retailization
Retail investors’ share of US private credit AUM went from effectively zero to around 13% over the past decade. In the euro area, roughly 20% of private credit funds are open-ended, and around 75% of those allow monthly or more frequent redemptions.
That structure met its first real test in early 2026. The FSB reports that several private credit funds received redemption requests exceeding stated withdrawal limits — which for many funds are set at 5% of NAV per quarter — with managers meeting requests up to those limits. Cliffwater’s $33 billion fund saw redemptions reach 14%; BlackRock and Morgan Stanley each restricted withdrawals at private credit vehicles in March 2026.
The IMF’s April 2026 Global Financial Stability Report concluded that liquidity mismatches in private credit appear confined to semiliquid structures, implying contained systemic impact, while flagging that rising borrower stress and growing retail exposure could test those structures.
Insurance Capital Behind the Market
| Metric | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| US insurance liabilities controlled by PE-backed insurers | ~$900 billion | Recent | FSB (2026), citing Bank of England |
| Same figure in 2012 | $67 billion | 2012 | FSB (2026) |
| Growth multiple (calculated) | ~13.4x | 2012→recent | Axis Intelligence Research |
| Share of new US annuity sales to PE-backed insurers | 35% | 2023 | FSB (2026) |
| Structured securities as share of PE-linked insurer portfolios | ~27% | End-2024 | FSB (2026), citing BIS Papers no 161 |
| Same share for other large insurers | ~12% | End-2024 | FSB (2026) |
| Estimated private credit share of life insurer portfolios | ~10% | 2025 | S&P Global Ratings, via FSB |
| Estimated private credit share of non-life insurer portfolios | ~3% | 2025 | S&P Global Ratings, via FSB |
How Much Private Credit Is Funding AI Infrastructure?
The technology concentration in private credit is no longer abstract. According to the OECD’s Global Debt Report 2026, cited by the FSB, AI-related deals reached 34% of private credit deal activity in 2025, against an average of 17% over the previous five years — a doubling in one year.
Morgan Stanley’s estimate, reproduced in the FSB report alongside Bank of England analysis, projects $2.9 trillion of AI infrastructure capital expenditure between 2025 and 2028, of which $1.5 trillion is expected to come from external capital, including $800 billion from private credit. Axis Intelligence Research has treated this financing chain in detail in its analysis of AI data center financing.
Mia Scarlett: Thirty-four percent of deal activity in one sector, in a market whose borrowers already cluster at single-B and whose valuations are refreshed quarterly at the manager’s discretion. The concentration argument usually gets made about the S&P 500. It applies here with fewer marks and less liquidity.
Where the US Regulatory Picture Stands
Form PF, the SEC’s private fund reporting regime, has no private credit category. The SEC’s Q3 2025 Private Fund Statistics report 54,392 private funds with $26.87 trillion in gross assets and $16.92 trillion in net assets — broken out into private equity, hedge, real estate, venture capital, securitized asset, liquidity and “other private fund.” Direct lending is distributed across those buckets rather than named.
That is being addressed, slowly. On April 20, 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly proposed amendments to Form PF that include a request for comment on adding a private credit reporting section — covering how to define private credit funds, AUM thresholds, and data on leverage, financing counterparties, loan maturity and credit quality. The proposal contemplates a minimum twelve-month compliance transition after final publication.
Until that lands, PCOI’s component 1 has no path down.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this article was retrieved from a document opened during production between September 1 and September 2, 2026. Primary official-sector sources: the Financial Stability Board’s Report on Vulnerabilities in Private Credit (6 May 2026); the SEC Division of Investment Management’s Private Fund Statistics, Third Calendar Quarter 2025; Federal Reserve FEDS Notes (May 2025 and August 2026); the IMF Global Financial Stability Report, April 2026. Market-side primary sources: Proskauer’s Private Credit Default Index (Q2 2026 release, July 28, 2026); Fitch Ratings’ US private credit default rate commentary (May 18 and June 15, 2026); KBRA’s Q4 2025 Middle Market Borrower Surveillance Compendium.
Attribution of nested sources. Several figures reach us through the FSB report, which cites underlying work by UBS Credit Research, S&P Global Ratings, BIS, HKMA, OECD, Morgan Stanley and named academics. Where that is the case, the underlying originator is named in the table and the FSB is identified as the compiling document. Those figures are marked as non-primary in the accompanying dataset.
PCOI construction. Four components, each expressed as a dispersion ratio D = (High − Low) ÷ High × 100, weighted 0.30 / 0.25 / 0.30 / 0.15. Inputs are drawn exclusively from the fact table. Arithmetic was verified in two independent passes — floating-point and exact rational — producing an identical result of 42.164, reported as 42.2. The index is a snapshot as of September 2, 2026.
What PCOI does not do. It does not assess credit risk, predict defaults, or rank managers. It does not weight estimates by source credibility; a wide gap between two well-founded estimates and a wide gap between one good and one poor estimate produce the same reading. It uses the most and least conservative credible published figures, not a full distribution.
Currency and dates. All figures are US dollars unless marked. Dates are as-of dates for the underlying observation, not publication dates.
About This Dataset
private-credit-statistics.csv contains every quantitative claim in this article as a single row, with value, unit, as-of date, geography, segment, source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, a primary-source flag, and — for Axis-calculated rows — the formula used.
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Free to reuse, republish and redistribute with attribution.
Citation Block
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Private credit statistics 2026: Market size, default rates, and the $780 billion measurement gap. https://axis-intelligence.com/private-credit-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “Private Credit Statistics 2026: Market Size, Default Rates, and the $780 Billion Measurement Gap.” Axis Intelligence Research, 2 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/private-credit-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “Private Credit Statistics 2026: Market Size, Default Rates, and the $780 Billion Measurement Gap.” Axis Intelligence Research. September 2, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/private-credit-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do published private credit default rates differ by a factor of two or more?
Because the definitions differ, not the data. Proskauer’s index counts a missed payment, a distressed restructuring, a breached financial covenant, or a loan modification made in anticipation of default, and allows a loan to return to non-default status — producing 2.51% for Q2 2026. Fitch applies a broader frame that captures distressed exchanges and duress-driven maturity extensions, producing 6.0% for the twelve months to April 2026. The FSB frames the same split as roughly 1% outright versus roughly 5% including selective defaults. Anyone quoting a private credit default rate should name the definition alongside the number.
Does a rising PIK share mean borrowers are in trouble?
It depends on which PIK. A PIK note lets a borrower defer cash interest from origination — it is a structural feature priced in at the outset. A PIK toggle is an option to defer later in the loan’s life, and that is the one that carries signal: research cited by the FSB associates toggle use with a one to two percentage point increase in the likelihood of delinquency in the following quarter, against an unconditional base of about 3%. Roughly 12% of private credit loans carry PIK, with toggles making up about half.
How would I verify the Private Credit Opacity Index myself?
Take the four low/high pairs in the component table, compute (High − Low) ÷ High × 100 for each, multiply by the stated weights of 0.30, 0.25, 0.30 and 0.15, and sum. You should get 42.164. Every input pair is a row in the downloadable dataset with its source URL and retrieval date. If you disagree with an input choice, substitute your own and the index recomputes cleanly — that is the point of publishing the formula.
Are private credit borrowers actually more leveraged than leveraged loan borrowers?
On reported figures, yes: 5–6x debt-to-EBITDA against roughly 4x for broadly syndicated loans. The gap is likely wider than that. The FSB, citing UBS Credit Research, notes that structural EBITDA add-backs mean true private credit leverage sits closer to 7x. Add-backs are not unique to private credit — the leveraged loan market uses them too — but private credit borrowers are smaller, cluster at single-B, and are less frequently rated by a public agency, so there is less external friction on the assumptions.
What happened to private credit fund redemptions in early 2026?
Several semiliquid vehicles received redemption requests above their stated quarterly withdrawal limits, which for many funds sit at 5% of NAV. Managers honoured requests up to those limits. Cliffwater’s $33 billion fund saw redemptions reach 14%; BlackRock and Morgan Stanley each restricted withdrawals at private credit funds in March 2026. The FSB’s read is that meeting requests at the cap may itself have stimulated further redemption pressure. The IMF’s April 2026 view is that the mismatch remains confined to semiliquid structures.
How much of the private credit market is exposed to AI and data centre lending?
AI-related deals accounted for 34% of private credit deal activity in 2025, against a 17% average over the prior five years, per the OECD’s Global Debt Report 2026. Looking forward, Morgan Stanley projects $800 billion of private credit within $1.5 trillion of external capital funding $2.9 trillion of AI infrastructure capex between 2025 and 2028. Exposure at the average fund remains modest; the concentration risk sits at the sector level.
Do banks have material private credit exposure?
Direct exposure is small and imprecisely known. Where it can be separately identified, bank lending to private credit funds is under 0.5% of total bank assets. The FSB’s member-collected total is around $220 billion of drawn and undrawn lines; commercial estimates run $270–500 billion. The sharper number is concentration: five banks hold 63% of committed lending to BDCs, and ten hold about 84%.
Will Form PF start reporting private credit separately?
That is the proposal. On April 20, 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly proposed Form PF amendments including a request for comment on a private credit reporting section — definitions, AUM thresholds, and data on leverage, financing counterparties, loan maturity and credit quality. A minimum twelve-month compliance transition would follow final publication. Until it takes effect, US private credit funds file inside categories that do not name them.
Is private credit bigger than the leveraged loan market?
They are approximately the same size. The FSB puts private credit at $1.5–2.0 trillion against an institutional leveraged loan market of $1.5–1.7 trillion and a US high-yield bond market of roughly $2 trillion. What has changed is direction of travel: private credit has grown roughly fivefold since 2009 by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, and threefold in the US since 2019 by the FSB’s.
Related Axis Intelligence Research Analysis
- US Corporate Debt Statistics — the public-market side of the same borrower universe
- Corporate Debt Maturity Wall Statistics — refinancing pressure through 2028
- Private Equity Statistics — the sponsors on the other side of most private credit loans
- Venture Debt Statistics — the adjacent non-sponsor lending market
- Venture Capital Statistics — upstream capital formation
- AI Data Center Financing Statistics — where the $800 billion private credit projection lands