Credit card users are showing less and less loyalty to their current brands, even as the trend of carrying just one card increases.
It’s not even about satisfaction with consumers’ current cards. The new State of Credit Report from Marqeta found that 72%of global users who are satisfied with their credit cards still plan to apply for a new card. The percentage of consumers considering a new card who are unsatisfied with their current card is just a little bit higher, 77%.
Even 70% of those consumers with no plans to shop around for a new issuer say they could be swayed to apply for a new card by the right reward or feature. This is even truer for U.S. consumers ages 18 to 43, with 80% saying they would do so.
As more cards offer these attractive special features, they are compensating by raising interest rates. Data from Bankrate released last month found that the average APR for retail credit cards has hit a record high of 30.45%. As Marqeta’s survey found, this is a big reason consumers are restless with their existing cards.
Settling on One Card
More than half of all global consumers still have more than one credit card, but there is a definite top-of-wallet effect going on. The vast majority of the respondents said they use one card more than the others. Nearly half said they use their favorite card for more than half of their purchases.
Now that most people have a favorite card, many consumers are building on that idea and carrying just that one card. Between 2022 and 2024, the number of U.S. credit card holders with more than one card dropped from 73% to 63%. Younger people especially have grown up with the idea that they need only one card. In the United States and the United Kingdom, nearly half of all people 18 to 43 report that they have only one credit card.
These trends suggest that there are many abandoned credit cards out there. A third of global consumers say they stopped using a particular card in the past 12 months.
When consumers were asked why they had set aside cards they had once used regularly, the most common response was that the interest rate was too high. Other popular responses were that a new card that better fit their needs or that they needed a higher credit limit.
