Federal Reserve Readies Pilot Survey to Gauge Private Credit Markets

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York plan to launch a pilot survey of the U.S. private credit market.

The organizations expect to launch the survey after the end of the third quarter and publish aggregate level findings during the first quarter of 2027, they said in a Wednesday (Aug. 5) press release.

The survey will be part of market intelligence efforts, the findings will not be used for supervisory purposes and participation will be voluntary, according to the release.

“After rapid growth in recent years, the U.S. direct lending market is estimated to be more than $1.3 trillion, comparable in size to both the high-yield bond and broadly syndicated loan markets,” the two Federal Reserve Banks said in the release. “Unlike public credit markets, in which conditions can be tracked through public market data, visibility into new private credit lending activity is more limited.”

The new survey will gather information about the availability of credit, credit provision, lending standards in private credit markets, and the implications for the broader economy and monetary policy, according to the release.

The survey will segment the direct lending market into three borrower sizes: upper middle market with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of greater than $100 million, middle market with EBITDA of between $30 million and $100 million, and lower middle market with EBITDA of less than $30 million, per the release.

It was reported in April that the Federal Reserve asked America’s biggest banks to share details about their private credit exposure. The request came after a wave of redemptions from the funds, and an uptick in troubled loans in the private credit space, and it was designed to determine the amount of stress in the private credit sector, and its potential to infect the larger financial system.

The Federal Reserve’s April 2025 Financial Stability Report found that private credit stress and nonbank financial institution stress were increasingly identified by the Fed’s market contacts as avenues of financial shock. While those factors were not on a list of “most cited potential shocks over the next 12 to 18 months” in fall 2024, private credit stress was cited by about 20% of the market contacts in April 2024, while nonbank risks were cited by a midteen percentage of respondents.