Banking statistics for February 2026
Commentary by Miroslav Zámečník, Chief Advisor of the Czech Banking Association
A great month before Hormuz
February was a very good month for the Czech banking sector despite the prophecies. In addition to the fact that households were willing to take out loans for housing and also for consumption, companies were also interested in borrowing. February 2026 was a record-breaker in several categories. For the first time, the volume of deposits of the population exceeded CZK 3.9 trillion, and for the first time, indebtedness exceeded CZK 2.5 trillion. However, the share of non-performing loans, which people and companies have difficulty repaying, reached multi-year lows or equalled them. But that was before Hormuz.
Households
Consumer credit
Total consumer lending (excluding overdrafts and credit card balances) reached £377bn in January, up 1.37% month-on-month, which is a lot, as well as up 12.5% year-on-year. The volume of new business reached CZK 14 billion in February, which, combined with the continued dynamic growth of real wages, is supporting household consumption and, through it, the main lever of economic growth so far. The CSO confirmed its dynamics last year at 2.6%, a very solid result compared to the long-term Czech average growth rate (CAGR; 1.8% between 2004 and 2024 in 2015 prices), which also stands up to regional comparison (the second best in the region after Poland). However, the big question is how the Czech population will react to the Gulf conflict and the associated incipient inflationary pressures - a typical response in the last few crises caused by external shocks has been increased savings as the population stopped spending and started saving.
The worsening outlook has not yet had time to filter through to the quality of the credit portfolio: bank consumer loans showing difficulty in repayment ("non-performing", excluding overdrafts and credit card balances) have stagnated at 4.11% month-on-month, still the second best figure in the past year. The excellent current figures may be exacerbated by the slowdown in growth and its components, but I daresay they will remain at disproportionately lower levels than, for example, 10 years ago: in February 2016, according to CNB statistics, the share of non-performing loans in this category was 10.45%. The current trend is therefore very favourable.
Housing
According to the original data of the CBA Hypomonitor, banks and building societies granted new mortgages in February in the amount of CZK 29.7 billion, which represents a solid month-on-month increase from CZK 27.2 billion, but more importantly, it is a very dynamic year-on-year increase compared to the CZK 21.1 billion in February last year. If we wrote that mortgage rates "have nothing to push down", then that was true up to and including February, when they were lending at 4.46%, with a year-on-year reduction of less than three-tenths of a percentage point, but with the average monthly payment rising. This is due to the increase in the average mortgage size, which has already climbed to CZK 4.63 million.
Sometimes a month is a very long time to bring with it a substantial change in market conditions. Unfortunately, the events in the Strait of Hormuz have spilled over into a rise in koruna swap rates, which serve as a benchmark for mortgages, to which a reasonable interest margin must be added (before 28 February 2026, they were around 0.8-1.2%). Let us hope, therefore, that the 0.8 percentage point jump in the three-year interest rate swap (to 4.2% as of 3 April) compared to the end of February is just a short-term phenomenon that banks will not pass on in full to new mortgage rates for competitive reasons, and that the causes themselves will subside as soon as possible.
The data for March and the following months will also show the reaction to the CNB's measure increasing the macroprudential LTV parameter to 30% (of the equity in the appraised price of the property) for mortgages on "investment flats" from 1 April.
For the time being, the quality of the mortgage portfolio is excellent on a pan-European scale, with only 0.53% of mortgages experiencing repayment difficulties lasting more than three months in February, classifying them as "non-performing". This is a new low.
Non-financial corporations
If we look at the evolution of corporate loan balances, we see another robust month-on-month increase, after January's +1% to February's +1.57% to CZK 1.541 trillion (CZK 100 billion more than in February 2025). Meanwhile, new loan production reached CZK 57 billion in February, of which CZK 28 billion were loans in koruna and the equivalent of CZK 29 billion were in euro. Interest rates on new koruna business averaged 5.1% in February, while euro loans averaged 3.0%.
The share of non-performing loans in the non-financial sector as a whole, at just 2.34%, is doing exceptionally well, even 4 hundredths of a percentage point below the previous all-time record set in August 2024. Together with the still high level of corporate deposits (CZK 1.645 trillion), everything suggests that, as a whole, "corporates" are very healthy.
Development of the main segments of the credit market (year-on-year, %)
Deposits
The year-on-year growth rate of the population's deposits has gradually declined over the past two years, reaching a level of around 5% at the end of last summer, where it remained in February at 5.3%. Compared to the very strong month-on-month rise in deposits of CZK 47.6 billion in January, February's increase in deposit balances was "less than" CZK 23 billion, but again exceeded the CZK 3.9 trillion (!) mark for the first time by CZK 4.7 billion, and rose by almost CZK 200 billion (197.8 billion) year-on-year. Incredible is the balance of CZK 1.281 trillion in the current accounts of the population, which corresponds to about 15% of the Czech gross domestic product!
Given that the population owes CZK 2.5 trillion to banks and building societies, households are significant net providers of resources to the banking system.
As for non-financial corporations, here we see a strong month-on-month increase in deposits from CZK 1.616 trillion to CZK 1.645 trillion; they continue to have more deposits in banks than they borrow: the difference in February was around CZK 105 billion.
The above shows that banks have a very large liquidity surplus from which they could finance further credit expansion without hitting the limits of their capital endowment, which is also very strong. Let us hope that the March external shock will have only a short-term effect and will not interrupt the development of the last period, when lending activity in all major segments supported very solid economic growth dynamics by Czech standards.
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 (%, 12/2025)
Source: EBA