Key Takeaways
- BNPL late payments have risen every year for three straight years: 34% of users paid late in 2024, 41% in 2025, and 47% in 2026, according to LendingTree surveys — meaning nearly half of all BNPL users are now missing at least one payment per year.
- If you use BNPL and plan to apply for a personal loan, the lender’s soft-pull credit check probably won’t see your outstanding BNPL balances — but if a BNPL late payment hits 30 days past due, it can damage the FICO score that determines your rate.
- BNPL users carry an average of $453 more in personal loan debt than non-users, according to Empower data, meaning many people are managing both simultaneously — and that stacked-debt picture is one lenders can’t fully see at application.
- 88% of BNPL users who asked to have a late fee waived got it reduced or eliminated entirely, according to LendingTree’s June 2026 tracker — so if you’re paying late, call the lender before the fee posts.
Nearly half of all buy now, pay later users, 47%, paid late on a BNPL loan in the past year. That number is from LendingTree’s 2026 BNPL Report, based on a survey of 2,060 U.S. consumers fielded in March 2026, and it’s the third straight annual increase: 34% in 2024, 41% in 2025, now 47%. If you’re one of the millions of borrowers who use BNPL alongside a personal loan or credit card, that trend matters to you directly.
The freshest data point comes from LendingTree’s June BNPL Tracker, a monthly survey fielded June 2-11, 2026, of 2,000 U.S. consumers. The tracker shows 59% of people considering a BNPL loan this month say they’re very confident they could repay it without missing a payment, up six percentage points from May, and the highest confidence reading since March. That’s a bit of good news sandwiched inside a report that otherwise tells a story of creeping overextension.
What the Late-Payment Numbers Are Actually Telling You
A 47% late-payment rate sounds alarming. The full context makes it a little more nuanced and a little more concerning, depending on which part you’re looking at.
Most late payers aren’t far behind. LendingTree found that 72% of those who paid late in the past year were no more than about a week late. A one-week-late BNPL payment generally won’t hurt your credit, most lenders don’t report to bureaus until 30 days past due. But it will often trigger a fee. According to a December 2025 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report, the average BNPL late fee charged in 2023 was $9.99. The June 2026 tracker adds a piece of information that almost nobody publicizes: 88% of BNPL users who asked to have a late fee waived either got the fee reduced or eliminated entirely. If you’re a week late and the fee shows up, call the lender. Most will clear it.
The part worth paying attention to is the trend line itself. Three years of consecutive annual increases, 34% to 41% to 47%, happening while consumer confidence in repayment is relatively high suggests this isn’t a panic-driven miss. People are managing cash flow across too many small obligations and occasionally coming up short. That’s a different problem, and a harder one to fix by just paying more attention.
Even putting aside credit damage, missed BNPL payments can cost real money if fees stack up. Suppose someone is running three BNPL loans simultaneously, a quarter of BNPL users carry three or more at once, according to LendingTree, and pays late on two in a year. At $9.99 per fee, that’s roughly $20. Small, until you consider that the same person using that money to make an extra payment on a $10,000 personal loan at 19% APR would save about $158 in interest over the life of the loan. The fees aren’t the disaster. The cash-flow fragmentation is.
The Problem Personal Loan Lenders Can’t See
Here’s the detail that matters most if you’re planning to apply for a personal loan in the next six to twelve months.
When a lender does a soft credit pull to give you a rate range, the step that happens before you formally apply, that pull is pulling from your credit file. Most BNPL loans don’t appear in that file. Affirm has started reporting to credit bureaus, and FICO began incorporating BNPL data into its Score 10 BNPL product in fall 2025. But the majority of outstanding BNPL balances from providers like PayPal Pay Later, Klarna, and Afterpay remain off the major bureau files entirely.
This creates a specific risk for borrowers. Say you’re carrying $800 in active BNPL obligations across three platforms when you apply for a $15,000 debt consolidation loan. The lender’s soft pull shows your credit card balances and your existing personal loans. It doesn’t show the BNPL. You look more qualified than you are. The lender offers you a rate based on a debt-to-income calculation that’s missing a real piece of your debt picture. You accept. Then three BNPL payment dates hit in the same week as your new loan’s first installment.
That scenario is playing out at scale. Empower data shows BNPL users carry, on average, $453 more in personal loan debt and $871 more in credit card debt than people who don’t use BNPL. The causal arrow runs in both directions, people under financial pressure reach for both tools. But it means the borrower walking into a personal loan application with active BNPL obligations is already carrying more total debt than the lender can see.
Lenders price personal loan rates off your FICO at the moment of your application. A BNPL payment that goes 30 days past due, uncommon, but the data shows it happens, will move that FICO. If that happens after you’ve accepted a loan offer but before the hard pull finalizes, the rate you were quoted and the rate you get could diverge. Most lenders lock the rate at the time of the hard pull, not at the time of the soft-pull quote. That gap is where a BNPL miss does real damage.
The fix is mechanical. Before you apply for a personal loan, check every BNPL platform you use and pay down or pay off any outstanding balances. Then wait a billing cycle before applying. If a BNPL payment did go more than 30 days past due in the last year, check your credit report at AnnualCreditReport.com to see whether it appears, because if it does, it will affect the rate you’re quoted.
If you ask a BNPL lender to waive a recent late fee before it ages into something worse, the June tracker says you have an 88% chance of success. Make the call. The fee is small; the credit-report entry is not.
