The State of Immigrant Finance in America

What the data says

The headline story in U.S. financial inclusion over the past decade has been improvement. The national unbanked rate fell to 4.2 percent in 2023, the lowest since the FDIC began measuring in 2009, and the share of adults with a scorable credit record rose from 81.6 percent in 2010 to 87.5 percent in 2020. Both of those are real gains.

Immigrant households did not share in them evenly. Between 2021 and 2023 the unbanked rate among foreign-born noncitizen households rose from 11.0 percent to 14.3 percent, a statistically significant increase and the largest of any group the FDIC breaks out, at a time when the national rate was falling. Foreign-born citizen households, by contrast, look almost identical to U.S.-born households on banking access: 3.8 percent unbanked against 3.5 percent. The gap tracks citizenship status far more closely than it tracks being born abroad.

Credit is where the gap is widest and most consequential. Nearly a third of noncitizen immigrant households used no mainstream credit product in a 12-month window. That is not only a borrowing problem: in the United States the credit file is the record that landlords, insurers, utilities and mortgage underwriters read. A household with no file is not judged as a risky borrower, it is judged as an unknown one, which in practice often costs more. Our guide on building US credit from zero as an immigrant covers what actually starts a file.

The CFPB's June 2025 correction matters for anyone quoting these numbers. The widely repeated claim that “26 million Americans are credit invisible” came from a 2015 report; the CFPB has since roughly halved that estimate for 2010, to 13.5 million, while raising the count of people who have a credit record that cannot be scored. The total population with a limited credit history barely moved. Nobody became visible; the boundary between “no file” and “unscorable file” moved. For a newcomer the practical experience is the same either way: an application that cannot be assessed.

Cost compounds the access gap. Immigrant households are the ones sending money abroad, at sixteen times the rate of U.S.-born households, and the average cost of sending $200 out of the United States was 6.03 percent, twice the international target. The same households are more likely to hold expensive credit when they hold any: with the average rate on card balances at 22.15 percent, a revolving $3,000 balance costs about $665 a year. Our free credit card payoff calculator shows what that looks like on a specific balance and payment.

Language sits underneath all of it. About 68 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, and among the 22 percent of the population aged five and over who do, roughly four in ten report speaking English less than “very well.” Financial literacy, meanwhile, has not moved in eight years: U.S. adults answered 49 percent of the P-Fin Index questions correctly in 2025, the same as in 2017, and adults with low financial literacy were three times more likely to be financially fragile. Financial explanations in the United States are overwhelmingly published in English, in the vocabulary of the system that produced them.

The pattern across all six datasets is consistent: the barrier is rarely the money and often the paperwork, the language and the missing file. That is why the products that close these gaps tend to be documentation and explanation, not credit.

Methodology and limits

This report contains no YPA-FINANCE survey data. It is a compilation: every figure is drawn from a public federal or multilateral dataset, cited below with a direct link to the document and the table it came from. We compiled it because these indicators are published separately and are not, as far as we can find, reported side by side for immigrant households anywhere else.

Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, the sources have different vintages, from December 2020 for the CFPB credit record estimates to May 2026 for the credit card rate; each figure is labelled with its own period and none should be read as a snapshot of a single moment. Second, the FDIC survey classifies by citizenship and place of birth, not by immigration status, language, or years since arrival, so “foreign-born noncitizen” covers a wide range of situations from a new student to a long-settled permanent resident. Third, these are associations in survey data, not causal estimates: the data shows that noncitizen households bank and borrow differently, not why.

Where a source publishes a newer edition we update the figure and the date on this page rather than leaving a stale number in place. If you find an error, email hello@ypa.finance and we will correct it.

How to cite this report

YPA-FINANCE (2026). The State of Immigrant Finance in America: 2026 Data Report. Available at https://www.ypa.finance/he/reports/state-of-immigrant-finance-2026. Figures compiled from the sources listed below and free to reuse with attribution.