Banking statistics for November 2025
Commentary by Miroslav Zámečník, Chief Advisor of the Czech Banking Association
Czechs have nominally the most money in banks in history: they were only CZK 10 billion short of reaching CZK 300 billion last November. Year-on-year, the population's deposits in banks rose by CZK 170.6 billion. At the same time, the Czechs are not stopping repaying like clockwork. Whether it is mortgages or consumer loans, as well as corporate investment and operating loans, in all cases the morale of Czech borrowers, both companies and households, is very good, and this is also true in a Europe-wide comparison. The share of loans experiencing repayment difficulties is at or just above historical lows.
Households
Consumer credit
Total consumer lending (excluding overdrafts and credit card balances) reached CZK 367.4 billion in August, up 0.9% month-on-month but up a strong 11.2% year-on-year. The volume of new business reached CZK 13 billion in October, which, combined with continued dynamic growth in real wages, supports the continuation of the trend of household consumption as the main driver of economic growth. It reached +2.8% yoy in Q3, ranking the Czech Republic second in the Central European region after Poland, and well above the EU27 average (+1.6%).
The share of bank consumer loans showing repayment difficulties ("non-performing") fell further month-on-month from 4.17% in October to 4.11% in November. This is roughly one-third the level of 10 years ago, when the economy was growing much faster, and the current trend is therefore very favourable.
According to the original data of the CBA Hypomonitor, banks and building societies granted new housing loans in November in the amount of CZK 32 billion, almost as much as the previous month (CZK 34 billion). With nothing to push mortgage rates downwards, rates remained at the October level of 4.48% in November. Although this is a year-on-year decrease of 0.37 percentage points, due to the rise in house prices and the amount of mortgages needed, applicants have to reckon with an increase in the repayment burden. Although the CNB has increased the LTV requirement to 30% of own funds, which should cool down the demand for investment flats acquired using the leverage of mortgage financing from April 2026, until then, the opposite effect of this measure can be expected, i.e. an additional demand impulse motivated by the slogan "take while they give".
A real improvement, especially in Prague's most overheated market, could come only with the eventual approval of the Metropolitan Master Plan, which envisages space for the construction of up to 350,000 new apartments, 70,000 of them in the "affordable housing" category. A positive supply shock could be achieved in combination with the approval of a new building law in the Chamber of Deputies, including provisions for "mass construction" in an accelerated "rubber stamping regime" for projects of about 100 or more apartments.
Only 0.55% of mortgages experienced repayment difficulties lasting more than three months, classifying them as "non-performing". This November figure was the lowest figure achieved in the past year, although data for the last month are still missing.
For loans made by banks to sole traders, the multi-year record was further improved, with the proportion of non-performing loans going even further below the 4% threshold to 3.87% from 3.94% in October, the lowest figure in at least 23 years! Ten years ago, the share of non-performing loans to sole proprietors was roughly triple.
Non-financial sector enterprises
If we look at the evolution of corporate loan balances, we see a month-on-month jump of almost 1.9 percentage points, with euro-denominated loans up by just under 1.6 percentage points. The sector was less than 12 billion short of the one and a half trillion kronor total in November, with new loan production reaching 65 billion kronor after 64 billion kronor in October (the difference between balances and monthly production is due to repayment of old loans). Interest rates on new kronor deals averaged 4.8% in November, while euro loans were one percentage point lower.
The share of non-performing corporate loans, i.e. those with repayment difficulties lasting more than 90 days, is at 2.5%, which is excellent, even in international comparison. Together with the still high level of corporate deposits (CZK 1.6 trillion), this suggests that "corporates" as a whole are very healthy, but unfortunately for the Czech economic dynamics, they are also very conservative, especially when it comes to investment in new machinery and technology.
Development of the main segments of the credit market (year-on-year, %)
Source: CNB, CBA Monitor
Deposits
The year-on-year growth rate of the population's deposits has bottomed out in the first half of 2022 in recent years, rising almost every month since then to values in excess of 8%, and since about May last year we have seen a trend slowdown to 4.7% in November. The total nominal (not real) volume of deposits, at almost 3 trillion and 800 billion crowns, is thus an all-time record. Deposits grew by more than CZK 170 billion year-on-year, despite falling deposit rates and the growing popularity of alternative forms of savings appreciation through mutual funds, especially equity funds.
As for non-financial corporations, here we register a significant month-on-month rise in deposits by two percentage points, or by 32.3 billion to CZK 1.6 trillion, and despite the year-on-year stagnation in deposits, corporations continue to have more deposited in banks than borrowed; the difference in November amounted to more than CZK 111 billion.
Development of deposits in the main segments (year-on-year, %)
Source: CNB, CBA Monitor
Non-performing loans in main segments (%)
Source: CNB, CBA Monitor
Share of non-performing loans in EU/EEA countries (%, Q3, 2025)
Source: EBA