ICE Mortgage Monitor – May 2026
The national mortgage delinquency rate dropped to 3.35% in March, which is actually pretty normal for this time of year, because people use tax refunds to catch up on payments. Still below pre-pandemic levels and so far no alarm bells yet. But the thing is that delinquencies are running 14 basis points above where they were a year ago, and the trend has been slowly ticking up.
Foreclosure starts jumped 10% month-over-month and 17% year-over-year. The 116,000 loans referred to foreclosure in Q1 was the highest quarterly number since early 2020, right before COVID protections froze everything.
Interestingly, more than half of all purchase loans in March went to first-time buyers highest since June 2020.
Average debt-to-income on purchase loans hit a near 3-year low of 39.6%, good sign.