Foreclosures Rising In 2026: Half The 21% Is FHA
UP 21% Not 2008 FHA delinquency 11.79% Watch on YouTube, 6:41The full breakdown runs 6:41. The written version below covers the numbers.
Foreclosures are rising in 2026, up 21% from last year. Will foreclosures come back the way they did in 2008? Not from this. Roughly half of that 21% increase is not what it looks like, and the half that is real sits almost entirely in FHA loans.
FHA delinquency, Q2 2026
Loans in foreclosure, all US
Days to foreclose, avg
The numbers
ATTOM counted 115,714 properties with foreclosure filings in Q2 2026, down 3% from Q1 and up 15% year over year, with starts up 18% and bank repossessions up 33%. The biggest increases were Idaho at +59%, Colorado +57%, Georgia +52%, North Carolina +47% and Mississippi +45%. The highest rates were Florida, South Carolina and Indiana.
Why speed inflates the count
The average time to foreclose is 563 days, down from 645 a year ago, the fastest pipeline since 2013. A completed foreclosure gets counted in the window it finishes in. When courts and trustees push files through faster, more completions land inside any six month window even if the same number of loans is going bad. ATTOM's own CEO calls this a normalization of the foreclosure process.
The clean test is the MBA's share of all US mortgages currently in the foreclosure process, which is immune to court speed. It stands at 0.67%, up 19 basis points in a year. It barely moved.
Where the real damage is
FHA delinquency reached 11.79% in Q2 2026, up 122 basis points in a year, against 1.9% for single family mortgages held on bank balance sheets. That is roughly 6.3 times worse. The cause is a policy expiry: FHA pandemic-era relief options ended in September 2025, and the reported number caught up to a book that had already deteriorated underneath them.
Who actually makes the payment
The mortgage servicer. The investor who owns the mortgage bond gets paid in full on the 1st whether the homeowner paid or not, so the servicer advances principal, interest, taxes and insurance out of its own cash across a 563-day process, then claims against the FHA insurance fund. FHA takes the credit loss; the servicer eats the carrying cost. That cash strain lands on the same nonbank lenders covered in UWM Stock Crash: 2026 Mortgage Crisis Explained.
The watch item
If that 0.67% share starts climbing while timelines keep getting shorter, new distress is outrunning the pipeline. That is the point where this spreads beyond FHA into the broader housing market.
Sources: ATTOM Mid-Year 2026 US Foreclosure Market Report and the Mortgage Bankers Association National Delinquency Survey, Q2 2026. All figures as reported.