Major Credit Card Debt Plagues 1 In 5 New Yorkers, Report Shows

NEW YORK — The denizens of Fifth Avenue may not be New York City's only big spenders. Nearly one in five New Yorkers has a five-figure credit card balance, making the Big Apple one of the nation's most debt-burdened cities, a recent report says.

Some 19 percent of cardholders in the city owe more than $10,000 on their credit cards, according to an analysis CompareCards published June 11. That's the fourth-highest rate among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., the research found.

And 1 percent of the city's cardholders have balances bigger than $50,000 — a rate that ties for third in the nation, the report shows.

The top 10 debt-burdened cities are clustered on the East and West coasts, according to CompareCards, which is owned by the mortgage service LendingTree.

Bridgeport, Connecticut has the highest rate of cardholders with five-figure debts at 22.9 percent, followed by Virginia Beach, Virginia with 20.5 percent and Washington, D.C. with 19.9 percent, the report says. Los Angeles ranked fifth with a rate of 18.6 percent.

Some of those cities also have high rates of income inequality in common, CompareCards says. That's significant because wealthy people can run up large credit card balances without worrying much about paying them down, according to the report.

"When you have a large number of people like that in the same city or metropolitan area with a large number of people with poor credit who either can’t get credit or just get small lines of credit that prevent one from running up a high balance, you get a situation like we see in Bridgeport: a high percentage of people with high balances," the report reads.

The CompareCards report is based on more than 1.2 million anonymized credit reports from MyLendingTree, a credit monitoring service, from the first quarter of this year. The site calculated users' balances and aggregated them across the nation's biggest metropolitan areas, according to the report.

Here are the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest rates of five-figure credit card debts, according to CompareCards. Read the full report here.

1. Bridgeport, Connecticut — 22.9 percent
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia — 20.5 percent
3. Washington, D.C. — 19.9 percent
4. New York City — 19 percent
5. Los Angeles — 18.6 percent
6. Hartford, Connecticut — 18.5 percent
7. San Diego — 18.5 percent
8. Albany, New York — 18.3 percent
9. Oxnard, California — 18.1 percent
10. Baltimore — 18 percent