Canadians usually pay their mortgages on time. But some fall behind on payments. Before they do, homeowners often increase their use of credit cards and lines of credit—and then can’t keep up on those payments.

For many Canadians, a mortgage is one of the most significant financial commitments they will ever make. While most homeowners can cover their mortgage payments, some struggle at times to keep up.

Households usually make paying their mortgage a priority. Most homeowners know that missing payments on a mortgage can lead to the loss of their home and difficulty obtaining credit in the future. The consequences for missing payments on credit cards or other debts are typically less severe, so households often put less priority on paying these debts.

Homeowners who miss a mortgage payment often do so after missing payments on their credit cards, auto loans and other credit products. So we asked ourselves: can we find specific patterns in how consumers use credit before they miss a mortgage payment?

To answer this question, we use anonymized data from TransUnion Canada, one of the two large credit bureaus in Canada. Specifically, we analyzed the credit history of 9 million Canadians who held mortgages between 2015 and 2024. Of those, close to 450,000 missed a mortgage payment at some point during this 10-year period. As we outline in our Staff analytical paper, we find that mortgage holders follow a similar sequence of changes in their use of consumer credit in the two years before missing a mortgage payment (Figure 1).