Payday Loan Borrowing by State

Pew’s nationally representative survey of payday loan borrowers includes state data on the percentage of people who use payday loans, as well as the number of survey interviews completed in each state. State payday loan usage ranges from 1 to 13 percent, although some states had fewer than 300 interviews and therefore the percentage is not reported.


State payday loan usage
State Percentage of Respondents
in State Reporting Payday Borrowing (%)
Number of Interviews
National  5.5 33,576
Alabama 7 523
Arkansas ** 288
Arizona 4 545
California 5 3862
Colorado 7 612
Connecticut 1 356
District of Columbia ** 83
Delaware ** 111
Florida 7 1874
Georgia 3 1033
Iowa 5 319
Idaho ** 216
Illinois 2 1103
Indiana 9 763
Kansas 8 353
Kentucky 8 531
Louisiana 10 484
Massachusetts 2 682
Maryland 3 649
Maine ** 167
Michigan 5 1058
Minnesota 4 615
Missouri 11 750
Mississippi ** 170
Montana ** 166
North Carolina 5 1185
North Dakota ** 87
Nebraska ** 236
New Hampshire ** 138
New Jersey 3 896
New Mexico ** 235
Nevada ** 246
New York 3 2072
Ohio 10 1409
Oklahoma 13 434
Oregon 5 482
Pennsylvania 3 1741
Rhode Island ** 108
South Carolina 7 502
South Dakota ** 93
Tennessee 6 807
Texas 8 2471
Utah 6 367
Virginia 4 943
Vermont ** 69
Washington 11 764
Wisconsin 5 674
West Virginia ** 227
Wyoming ** 77

*The survey was only conducted in the continental United States and therefore the survey data do not include Alaska or Hawaii. 

**Results are not reported for states where fewer than 300 interviews were completed because of the high margin of error associated with such results 

Note: Data represents percentage of adults in each state who report having used a payday loan in the past five years. Interviews were conducted from August 2011 through December 2011. Pew Safe Small-Dollar Loans Research Project, 2012.

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