Buy Now, Pay Later Debt Was Invisible for Years — Now It's Finally Hitting Credit Reports

For years, buy now, pay later loans were a blind spot. A shopper could take out a Klarna loan, an Afterpay loan, and an Affirm loan in the same week, and none of the three lenders — or any mortgage officer looking at a credit report — could see the other two.

That blind spot is closing. Starting in 2025 and continuing into 2026, all three major credit bureaus began incorporating BNPL loans into standard credit reports. Missed payments now damage your score the same way a missed credit card payment would.

The scale of what was hidden is significant. Sixty-three percent of BNPL users say they've held multiple loans at once, and a quarter have held three or more simultaneously. Among people juggling multiple loans, a third are spreading them across different providers — the exact pattern that made total exposure invisible to any single lender.

The risk hasn't gone away with the new reporting, it's just visible now. Forty-seven percent of BNPL users paid late at least once in the past year, up six points from the year before, and delinquency rates on other credit products run more than double for BNPL users compared to non-users.

Why this matters now

Lenders evaluating a mortgage or auto loan application can now see BNPL activity as part of someone's debt-to-income picture, where before it simply didn't exist on paper. That's a real shift in how "creditworthy" gets calculated for anyone who leaned on pay-in-four loans during a period when they were invisible.