---
title: "Past due, unchanged"
url: https://lendriskanalytics.com/insights/past-due-unchanged.html
publisher: LendRisk Analytics
series: What the Tape Said
issue: 11
kind: Operator study
description: "Eleven buy-here-pay-here stores, thirty months of real monthly numbers. The share of customers behind held steady. What each dollar of loss cost in interest moved, bottomed in late 2025, and is climbing back. What these operators did about it."
html: https://lendriskanalytics.com/insights/past-due-unchanged.html
---

# Past due, unchanged

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What the Tape Said · Issue 11
Operator study · 9 min read

Eleven stores · Thirty months · Real numbers

# Past due, unchanged.

Monthly operator data, January 2024 through June 2026 · No store identified · LendRisk Analytics

Ten issues of this series have been built on things anyone can look up. Court filings, bank disclosures, rating agency numbers. This one is different. It is built on the monthly numbers eleven buy-here-pay-here stores actually turn in, month after month, for two and a half years straight. Same eleven stores at the start and at the finish. What that lets you do, which no public report can, is hold a real set of books still and watch which numbers move and which ones do not. The one almost everybody watches did not move at all. Something else did.

31.7 → 32.4%

Customers behind. Basically flat across thirty months

$1.14 → $0.96

Interest collected for every dollar lost. Low was $0.83

36.6 mo

Average term written, down from 38.9. These stores tightened

11.2%

Cash down as a share of price. Same at the end as the start

How to read this
Everything here comes from eleven stores that reported every month from the first half of 2024 through the first half of 2026. Stores that joined partway through are left out, because otherwise you are measuring a changing roster instead of a changing business. When numbers get combined, **the dollars get added up first and then divided**. Averaging percentages would let a quiet month count the same as a heavy one, and that is how a book ends up looking better on paper than it does in the bank account.

**Here is the whole thing in two sentences.** Across thirty months, the share of customers sitting behind at these eleven stores did not really move. Over those same thirty months, what a dollar of loss cost them in interest did move, it got worse through 2025, and it has been coming back since.

## I · The number that held

Start with the number on every Monday morning report in this business. Customers behind, as a share of active accounts. These eleven stores came into 2024 at 31.7 percent and finished the first half of 2026 at 32.4 percent. Draw a line through all thirty months and it is flat. Not gently sloping. Flat.

That deserves to be said out loud, because holding a past-due number steady for two and a half years is work. Collectors were doing their jobs. Nobody let the book drift. If the only thing you had looked at over that stretch was the past-due column, you would have concluded the business was running exactly the way it ran in 2024.

Chart 1 · Two numbers from the same eleven stores

Top is the number everybody watches. Bottom is what a dollar of loss actually cost in interest. Same stores, same months.

Hover any month for both numbers

Same eleven stores, dollars added before dividing. The two panels sit one above the other, not on top of each other, because they are different kinds of number: one is a percentage of accounts, the other is dollars per dollar. Lines in different units should never be read against each other. The thin pale lines are the raw month-by-month readings, which bounce around because a light loss month makes the ratio jump. The heavy lines connect the half-year figures quoted in the text.

## II · What these stores did while it held

The past-due number did not stay flat by accident, and the deal terms show it.

Average term written came down from 38.9 months to 36.6 months. That is just over two months shorter, and it is the textbook move when customers are getting squeezed. Cash down finished at 11.2 percent of the selling price against 11.2 percent at the start, which means the down payment requirement held through a stretch when plenty of people would have been tempted to let it slide. Units sold were about six percent lower, which is what it looks like when a store turns down deals it does not like.

Chart 2 · Shorter contracts, and a down payment that did not slip

What these eleven stores were actually writing, half-year by half-year.

Hover a point for the exact figure

Term is weighted by units sold in each block. Cash down is total down collected divided by total selling price. The zigzag in the right panel is seasonal rather than a change in policy: down payments run higher in first halves and lower in second halves in every year here, which lines up with tax refund timing, so compare first half to first half. Down payment as submitted may include pickup payment arrangements at some stores, so read this as the terms written rather than strictly cash in the drawer at delivery. The two panels use different scales and are not comparable to each other.

Shorter contracts at a similar amount financed means a bigger monthly payment, and that shows up too. The average payment written went from about $500 to about $534, up close to seven percent, while the term came down almost six percent. That is the tradeoff these stores made, and on the evidence of the past-due line it worked.

## III · The number that moved

Now the other one. For every dollar these stores lost after the auction paid them back, how many dollars of interest did they collect?

In the first half of 2024 it was **$1.14**. Interest more than covered the losses. By the second half of 2025 it was **$0.83**. In the first half of 2026 it was back to **$0.96**. That is the bottom panel of Chart 1, and out of everything measured across these thirty months, it is the only number with a real trend behind it.

Two things are true about that at once, and both matter. It fell below the line where interest pays for the losses, and it has been climbing back for two straight blocks. The worst of it was late 2025.

**What this means**
Past due counts customers. This counts money. When the customer count holds and the money gets tighter, the arithmetic behind each account that goes bad has changed. It does not mean anyone got worse at their job, and section II is the evidence they did not. It means the same reading on the past-due column was carrying a different result underneath it.

## IV · Where it came from

Two things moved, and neither of them is something you decide at the desk.

**Losses got bigger.** For every $100 out on the street, these stores were writing off $18.32 a year after the auction paid them back at the start of the window. That went to $24.54 at the worst of it, and it is $21.03 now.

**The auction paid back less.** For every $100 written off, the lot was returning $32.63 at the start. That fell to $27.20 and has recovered to $30.95. That swing alone moves the whole picture, and it is set at the auction lane, not in your office.

What did not move much is what these stores were earning. Interest income ran right around 20 percent of money on the street the whole way through, easing only slightly. So the tighter number is not a story about earning less. It is a story about what the earnings were being measured against getting bigger for a while.

| Half-year | Customers behind | Lost per $100 out | Auction back per $100 written off | Interest per $1 lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 · first half | 31.7% | $18.32 | $32.63 | $1.14 |
| 2024 · second half | 33.0% | $19.94 | $30.81 | $1.03 |
| 2025 · first half | 30.3% | $22.86 | $28.72 | $0.88 |
| 2025 · second half | 33.1% | $24.54 | $27.20 | $0.83 |
| 2026 · first half | 32.4% | $21.03 | $30.95 | $0.96 |

Eleven stores, dollars added before dividing. Loss and interest figures are stated at an annual rate against money on the street at the start of each month. The last row beats the row above it on every single column, which is the most useful thing in this table.

## V · What a customer behind actually cost

Here is the same idea in the plainest form available. Take the dollars written off, after the auction, and divide by the number of customers sitting behind. That is roughly what one behind account was costing.

Chart 3 · Dollars written off per customer behind

Same share of the book behind, different amount of money attached to it.

Hover a bar for the detail

Net dollars written off in each half-year divided by the count of accounts behind in that half-year, across the same eleven stores. This is a rough comparison of two totals rather than a tracked account-by-account figure, since the panel does not carry the fields to follow an individual account from behind to written off. Treat it as a sense of direction, not a per-account cost you could book.

It ran $527 in the first half of 2024, climbed to $672 through 2025, and came back to $549. Roughly the same share of the book was behind at the start and the end. What was attached to those accounts got heavier for a while, and it is getting lighter again.

## VI · Not one or two stores

This is not one outlier dragging a group average around. Taking each store on its own and comparing the first half of 2024 with the first half of 2026, eight of eleven had the same or fewer customers behind, nine of eleven had a tighter interest-to-loss number, and seven of eleven had both at the same time.

Chart 4 · Every store, same comparison

Hollow dot is the first half of 2024. Filled dot is the first half of 2026. The note on the right is what that store's past-due count did.

Hover a row for that store

One row per store, lettered and ordered by where they started on past due, which is not a ranking of anything else. Anything past $2.45 is drawn at the edge and marked; one store started well above that on a very small loss base, so its opening figure is unstable and should be read as high rather than as a level. Past-due change is in percentage points and called about the same when the move is under 1.6 points.

## VII · What to do with this on your own book

None of this says the past-due report is wrong. It answers the question it was built to answer, which is how many customers are behind this month, and it answers it honestly. It just is not the only vital sign, and across these thirty months it was the one holding still.

The number that moved is one you can run yourself in about ten minutes, from figures you already have. Take the interest you collected for the month. Divide it by what you wrote off that month after subtracting whatever the auction gave back. That is dollars of interest per dollar of loss. Above $1.00 the interest paid for the damage. Below it, something else did.

Run it for twelve months and add the dollars up before you divide, because one quiet month will make a single month look spectacular and tell you nothing. That is the whole method.

## Where this comes up short

**Eleven stores is eleven stores.** Enough to say what happened to these eleven. Not enough to speak for the industry, and it is not trying to.

**Only one of these numbers is solid enough to call a trend.** The interest-per-dollar-lost move holds up when you test it properly. The loss rate and the auction recovery move in the direction described but do not clear the same bar on a month-by-month basis, which is why the half-year table is the honest way to show them.

**Past due is counted differently at different stores.** Some systems start counting at one day, some at thirty. That is why it is only ever used here to compare a store to itself over time, and never one store against another.

**Auction figures are as reported.** Whether a store books what the car actually brought or a value assigned when it came back is not something this data can tell.

**A growing book looks better on past due.** New accounts have not had time to fall behind, so a store adding accounts quickly will show a lower past-due share for the same underwriting. Account counts moved around quite a bit across these eleven, and this data cannot separate that out. It is the biggest open question here and worth saying plainly.

**Thirty months is not a cycle.** It covers one stretch of pressure and the start of a recovery, and that is all.

## Three things worth checking

### 1

Do you know what a dollar of loss costs you in interest right now, and what it cost two years ago? If the answer moved and nothing on your monthly sheet moved with it, the sheet is not wrong, it is just quiet.

### 2

When you look at your past-due column, do you know whether the accounts behind it are carrying more money than they used to? Same percentage, heavier accounts, is a real thing and it happened here.

### 3

When your numbers improve, do you know which half improved? These stores got better in 2026 mostly because the auction started paying again, not because they were earning more. Both are good news. They are not the same news, and only one of them is yours to keep.

The past-due report is the oldest number in this business and there is nothing wrong with it. Across thirty months at eleven stores it gave the same answer every time while the money behind that answer moved, went the wrong way for about a year and a half, and started coming back. Worth having a second number next to it.

**Sources & notes**
Every figure comes from monthly operating numbers submitted by eleven independently owned buy-here-pay-here stores taking part in a performance benchmarking group, covering January 2024 through June 2026, used with their permission and reported only as a group. No store, owner, location or business name appears anywhere here, and no number is traceable to any one of them. Stores are lettered in Chart 4 in the order they started on past due, which is not a ranking of anything else.

How the numbers were built. Everything is calculated from the raw figures each store submits rather than from any summary already sitting in the group's own reports, so a number here may differ from one circulated inside the group. Where stores are combined, dollars are summed first and then divided. Loss and interest rates are stated at an annual rate against money on the street at the start of each month. Interest per dollar lost is interest collected divided by what was written off after subtracting auction proceeds. To be included, a store had to report in both the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2026, which takes the group from fifteen stores to eleven.

Related reading. Issue 9 covers why cash leaves a buy-here-pay-here book on day one and comes back slowly. Issue 8 covers what a current flag does and does not tell you when a payment gets moved.

If you run this on your own book and get a different answer, that is the useful outcome and worth a conversation. Same if you think the growing-book problem above sinks the whole thing. [Send it through](https://lendriskanalytics.com/contact.html).

LR

LendRisk Analytics

Independent market research

Continue reading

[Issue · 09 · Deep study The *cash problem.*](https://lendriskanalytics.com/insights/the-cash-problem.html)
[Issue · 08 · Method study Current, *on paper.*](https://lendriskanalytics.com/insights/current-on-paper.html)