BankingLENS

Banking glossary

What is a nonaccrual loan?

Published September 20, 2026.

Nonaccrual: A nonaccrual loan is one the bank has stopped booking interest income on, because it no longer expects to collect it.

Where it comes from

Reported on Schedule RC-N. A loan generally moves to nonaccrual at 90 days past due, or sooner if full repayment of principal and interest is in doubt. Interest already accrued and not collected is reversed out of income in the quarter the loan moves.

How to read it

Nonaccrual is the bank’s own admission about a loan, which makes it a more honest signal than days past due. A loan can be current and on nonaccrual, and a well collateralized loan 90 days past due can keep accruing, so the two measures do not rank borrowers the same way.

The common mistake. Missing the earnings effect. Moving a loan to nonaccrual reverses interest that was already booked, so a single large credit going bad hits the income statement harder than its balance alone would suggest.

Go deeper

See also. Nonperforming loans, Charge-off, Allowance for credit losses, Texas ratio.

This page is generated by _tools/seo/build_glossary.mjs and carries no figure that was typed in. See our methodology and disclaimer. Definitions are general guidance, not regulatory or investment advice.

Knowing the definition is the easy half.

The hard half is whether a given bank’s number is good for the peer group it is actually measured in. That is what the scorecard does, for every bank that files a call report, updated with every FFIEC release.

See the dashboard