Alberta was handed the worst credit delinquency number in the country this week, and reporting on the release ties part of it to debt that was run up somewhere else first.
Equifax released its second quarter figures on Monday. Alberta’s 90 day delinquency rate on non-mortgage debt sits at 2.45%, against a national rate of 1.76%. Average non-mortgage debt per Albertan now stands at $25,082. In Fort McMurray it is $38,074, the highest of any city measured.
Key facts
- Equifax Canada reported on August 24, 2026 that Alberta’s 90 day delinquency rate on non-mortgage debt is 2.45%, against a national rate of 1.76%.
- Average non-mortgage debt per Albertan is $25,082, and $38,074 in Fort McMurray, the highest of any city measured.
The number nobody printed next to it
Read past the ranking and the picture changes. The province keeps taking in people from other provinces, and those households arrive with balances that were written somewhere else. Equifax’s Kathy Catsiliras tied part of the gap to that.
The statistic counts an arriving population as much as it counts anything Alberta itself did. That is how a province absorbing interprovincial migrants can see its growth published as a failure.
The pressure underneath is still real
Migration does not explain all of it. Isaiah Chan of the Credit Counselling Society pointed to incomes that have not kept pace with the cost of living. A province with a strong energy sector can still carry the country’s highest odds of a household falling three months behind on a card payment. Both of those things are true in the same province, in the same quarter.
Only one number makes the budget speech
Government revenue projections get a headline every year. Household delinquency data gets a Monday afternoon Equifax release that most people never see unless a ranking makes it sting. A province can be genuinely growing and genuinely straining its own households at the same time, and the fact that only one of those numbers regularly reaches a budget document does not make the other one less true.
A ranking that counts every balance in the province does not say where each one was run up.
A household three months behind on a card can call a credit counselling agency before the account reaches collections.
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