California — debt in collections by county

Across the 57 counties in California measured by the Urban Institute's Debt in America survey, 18.2% of adults have at least one account in collections. The county-level range is wide: Modoc, CA sits at 28.0% while Placer, CA is just 10.6% — a 2.6× spread within a single state.

The median dollar amount in collections for California residents is $2,190 per affected adult, based on Urban Institute's 2024 release.

The Urban Institute reports debt in collections in four categories. Across California's 57 counties, the average rates are:

• Any debt in collections: 18.2% of adults
• Medical debt in collections: 3.5% — debt sent to collections for medical bills
• Credit card delinquency: 4.7% — 90+ days past due on at least one card
• Auto/retail loan delinquency: 3.8% — 60+ days past due on auto or retail credit

These figures are county averages weighted equally — the underlying Urban Institute sample uses credit-bureau records, which exclude adults who do not have a credit file. Rates can be substantially higher for credit-active adults than for the full adult population.

Search queries for "California state debt" return two very different things depending on what you're actually after. This page covers the first: what California households owe to credit bureaus, derived from the Urban Institute's 2-percent national credit-file sample. It is not California's state government bond debt or budget deficit — that's a different dataset (CA State Treasurer / Comptroller).

Across the 57 California counties measured, 18.2% of credit-active adults have at least one account in collections. The county-level range is wide: Modoc, CA at 28.0% sits roughly 2.6× higher than Placer, CA at 10.6%. That spread reflects California's polarised economy — high-income coastal metros vs lower-wage inland counties — not a uniform statewide condition.

The Bay Area — San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Marin — sits at the low end of the California distribution. Median household incomes well above $130,000 + the highest concentration of credit-active high-income adults in the country means a smaller share of residents fall into collections in the first place. Bay Area collections rates typically run 10–13% — closer to Massachusetts than to the California average.

Los Angeles County sits roughly at the state average. The country's most populous county (~9.7M residents) is doing a lot of statistical work in any "California" aggregate, and LA's mid-position pulls California's headline figure into a narrow band that doesn't reflect how wide the within-state distribution actually is.

The Central Valley and Inland Empire — Fresno, Tulare, Kern, San Bernardino, Riverside, Imperial — drive the top end of California's collections rates. These counties combine lower median wages, higher uninsured rates relative to coastal California, and lower credit-bureau coverage of the working-age population. Modoc, CA (28.0%) is the California county with the highest reported rate in this dataset.

Northern rural counties — Lassen, Modoc, Trinity, Siskiyou — register as low-debt in this dataset, but the credit-active adult population in these counties is small and the Urban Institute model's confidence intervals are wider. Treat as suggestive rather than definitive.

California's statewide debt-in-collections rate ranks roughly mid-pack nationally. The states with the highest collections rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma — combine higher poverty, higher uninsured populations, and (for the medical-debt component specifically) more limited Medicaid expansion histories. California has had Medicaid expansion since 2014 (Medi-Cal), one of the lowest uninsured rates in the country, and stronger consumer-protection law than the states topping the rankings.

But the California pattern is unusual in one specific way: the gap between Bay Area collections rates and Central Valley rates is one of the widest within-state spreads in the country. Most states either run high across the board (the Deep South) or low across the board (the Upper Midwest). California runs high and low at the same time, in different counties, often within a two-hour drive of each other. State-level aggregates miss that structure entirely.

For per-county detail at the household-debt level, browse the map at California county debt collections map. For California's state-government debt or budget figures, see the CA State Treasurer's office.

The figures on this page are sourced from the Urban Institute Debt in America (2024) release. The Urban Institute calculates each county-level rate from a 2-percent random sample of credit-bureau records, then publishes the share of credit-active adults with at least one account that has been sent to a third-party collection agency or in-house collections unit.

"In collections" means a debt is 90+ days past due and has either been written off by the original creditor or assigned to a collection agency. The Urban Institute reports four breakdowns — overall, medical, credit-card delinquency, and auto/retail delinquency. Medical debt in collections is reported only when it exceeds $500 per the 2022 credit-bureau reporting change.

Coverage caveat: the survey excludes adults without a credit file, which means the published rates are for the credit-active population only. Rates for the full adult population (including those without credit) are typically lower in absolute terms but follow the same county-to-county ordering. Counties with fewer than 50 sampled adults are not published.

Data is free under the Urban Institute's open-data policy. Figures here are licensed under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to USInsights.