Current, on tape.

Bottom line

Here is the whole exercise. Take the July 2026 tape for every registered auto deal I hold, twenty-nine of them. For each loan, read two fields: the days past due the servicer reports, and the number of months the loan was extended that period. Work out 60+ delinquency the way every index does, weighted by balance. Then work it out again with one change. Any loan that is under 60 days late today but got an extension in the last six months gets counted as delinquent. The second number is not a prediction. It is the most the extension mechanism could have taken out of the first.

On the subprime shelves, one dollar in five of what is outstanding today was extended in the last six months. Nearly half has been extended at some point. The reported delinquency number sits on top of that. The prime shelves run the same mechanism at about a sixth of the scale.

I · What the field says, and how two ways of filing it nearly hid half the market

Item 1125 of Regulation AB lists what a registered auto deal has to file about every loan, every month. Item 3(f)(25) is days past due. Item 3(f)(6) is the payment due next period. Item 3(j) only applies "if the loan has been modified from its original terms," and inside it, Item 3(j)(2) asks for "the number of months the loan was extended during the reporting period." Read that phrase twice. It is a per-month entry, not a running total, and it only has to be there when something was modified.

Santander says the reset out loud in its own filing. The EX-103 narrative attached to Santander Drive 2024-1's July 2026 tape defines the next payment due as the amount needed "for the receivable to be considered current," and then: "If 'next reporting period payment amount due' is reported as 0.00, no interest or principal is due in the next reporting period for the receivable to be considered current because the obligor either made a payment in advance or was granted a payment extension." Exeter and AmeriCredit file nearly the same sentence.

Issuers fill in Item 3(j)(2) two different ways, and that difference is why this brief looks the way it does. Exeter, AmeriCredit, Santander, GM Financial and Hyundai write the field on every loan every month. Zero when nothing happened, a 1 or a 2 in the month an extension was granted, zero again after. Ally, CarMax, Carvana, Ford, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, World Omni and Bridgecrest leave the tag out entirely unless something was modified, and fill it in only in that month. Both are fine under the rule. They are not the same to a parser. The desk I built in August looked for an increase over the prior month's value. For the second group there is no prior value, so the increase came out as nothing, and those shelves read as extension-free. The first draft of this piece was going to say prime lenders do not extend. That was wrong and the mistake was mine. The rule that holds up is the plain one: a positive value in the month is an extension in the month.

One narrative does not match its tape. Carvana's EX-103 for CRVNA 2024-P2 lists Item 3(j)(2) as "No response," yet the filed EX-102 carries values of one to three months on a few hundred loans each period, next to modification type codes. I used the values. Honda's narrative says modification type "4" is an extension and that Item 3(j)(2) can go negative when a prior extension is reversed. AmeriCredit says the same. Negative values were treated as no extension.

II · Same servicer, two shelves

GM Financial services a prime shelf and the AmeriCredit subprime shelf. It files both with explicit zeros, and it filed July 2026 tapes for both on the same schedule. Whatever is different between the two, it is not the servicer, the filing style, or the month.

The prime shelf reports 0.55% and reads 4.64% adjusted. The subprime shelf reports 3.86% and reads 28.69%. Reported, the two are seven times apart. Adjusted, six times. So the extension mechanism is not what makes subprime look worse than prime. It is what makes subprime look better than it is. On that shelf, for every dollar reported 60+ there are more than six dollars that were extended in the last six months and are not.

III · Fifteen lenders, one ledger

Three things in that table that the tier averages hide.

The captives are not at zero. Honda and Nissan are the floor, with roughly 1.1 to 1.3% of balance extended in six months, and even there the adjusted number is four to fifteen times the reported one, because the reported one is so small. Ford reports 0.28% and reads 5.18%. Nobody on this list has an extension policy of none.

CarMax and Carvana sit between the tiers on every column. CarMax reports 1.82% and reads 6.82%. Carvana reports 1.88% and reads 5.23%. Their six-month redefault rates, 19.6% and 23.4%, are closer to Santander's 24.0% than to any captive's. An average score in the low 700s got these pools a prime label. It did not get them a prime cure rate.

The subprime shelves do not agree with each other. Santander's gap is 1,117 basis points on 12.3% of balance extended in six months. Exeter's is 2,562 on 30.2%. Bridgecrest, in the registered market for the first time with its 2025-1 trust, reports the highest raw delinquency of the fifteen at 11.23% and still carries a 1,791 point gap on top of it. Exeter is where the extension is closest to the norm. On its 2022-1 trust, 75% of the balance still outstanding has been extended at least once.

IV · What happens in the six months after

The adjusted number is a ceiling, and it needs to be said that way every time. Not every extended loan would have gone 60+. The measurement that turns the ceiling into an estimate is the one the Philadelphia Fed said in April was the open question. Its report found that "while the stock of severe auto delinquencies is rising, the flow of new delinquencies into this stage is fairly stable," that the share of subprime loans getting an extension "reached approximately 3.5 percent last year," and offered this: "If extensions temporarily return borrowers to current status, but many borrowers subsequently fall behind again, the result is a cycle that keeps loans in the delinquent population longer." Its data are bureau tradelines, which cannot see the extension. The tapes can.

So take every extension granted on the forty-four live deals to a loan that was under 60 days late at the time, with at least six more months of tape to watch. That is 513,907 of them. Ask two things of each. Did the loan hit 60+ in the next six months. Was it charged off.

On the prime shelves, seven in eight extended loans do not reach 60+ inside six months. That is what a hardship tool doing its job looks like. On the subprime shelves it is seven in ten. On Exeter and Bridgecrest it is under six in ten: 41.7% and 42.4% of extended loans are 60+ again within six months, and 12% to 15% are charged off in the same window. On those shelves an extension is, more often than anywhere else in the table, a loss that has been pushed down the road.

The last column changes how you should read the reported number. On every shelf, extensions overwhelmingly go to loans that have not yet shown as 30 days late. 99.2% of prime extensions, 93.9% of subprime ones. Exeter is the outlier at 10.1% granted to loans already 30+. So the reset does not mostly pull accounts out of the delinquency buckets. It mostly keeps them from ever going in. That is why the flow of new delinquencies can look flat while the adjusted stock climbs, which is exactly the shape the Philadelphia Fed found in the bureau data and could not explain from it.

V · Why six months, and what three or twelve would say

The lookback is a choice. A loan extended two years ago and current today is not being masked. A loan extended last month is. I picked six months before running the numbers. Here is what the other two obvious choices give you, same tapes, same month.

The choice moves the level. It does not move the ranking. That is the property you want from a convention. The six-month redefault window in Section IV is matched to the six-month lookback on purpose. A loan the extension held for six months is a loan the six-month adjustment should stop counting.

VI · Where the record goes dark

Everything above comes from registered deals, because only registered deals file Form ABS-EE. Private 144A placements do not. Search EDGAR's full-text index for ABS-EE filings by shelf and the Tricolor trusts return nothing. Neither do CPS, Westlake, GLS, Flagship or First Investors. Tricolor failed in September 2025 and its loan tapes were never public. The lenders most likely to run a heavy extension book are, by how the market is built, the ones this method cannot see. Bridgecrest is the exception that makes the point. DriveTime's DT Auto trusts were 144A. Its 2025 Bridgecrest trust is the first tape from that book anyone outside the deal has been able to read.

VII · What this does not show

Five things, so nobody has to find them for me.

Proof: every figure, traced

Every figure was rebuilt from the filed EX-102 asset data files for this publication, after the correction in Section I. Recomputed means the number was rebuilt from the loan-level records and matched. Derived means calculated from recomputed figures, arithmetic shown. Verified means read straight from the cited public document.