The Federal Reserve is finally getting a window into one of the fastest-growing corners of American finance. On August 5, 2026, the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and New York announced a pilot survey of the roughly $1.3 trillion U.S. private credit market — the first regularly-collected, standardized data set the central bank will have on the direct-lending industry that has ballooned since the 2008 financial crisis. The pilot launches after the end of the third quarter of 2026, with aggregate findings targeted for release in the first quarter of 2027.
Participation will be voluntary, and the Fed has explicitly stated that the findings will not be used for supervisory purposes — a reassurance aimed at coaxing private-credit managers, who are outside the perimeter of bank regulation, to hand over data they normally guard closely.
What the survey will actually collect
According to the New York Fed’s statement, the pilot will focus on three things: “the availability of credit, credit provision, and the evolution of lending standards in private credit markets, and the implications for the broader economy and monetary policy,” as reported by Reuters. In plain English: how much is being lent, on what terms, and how those terms are drifting.
The survey segments the market into three buckets based on borrower EBITDA — the standard shorthand for company size in leveraged lending:
| Segment | Borrower EBITDA | Typical borrower |
|---|---|---|
| Upper middle market | > $100 million | Sponsor-backed LBO targets often on the border between private credit and the broadly syndicated loan (BSL) market |
| Middle market | $30–100 million | Core direct-lending territory: mid-sized private-equity portfolio companies |
| Lower middle market | < $30 million | Smaller sponsor-backed and independent businesses; historically bank-financed |
Segmenting the market this way lets the Fed track lending standards where they matter most. Underwriting risk in a $150 million-EBITDA sponsor LBO looks nothing like risk in a $20 million-EBITDA regional services business, and rolling both into one blended average would hide the exact deterioration regulators are worried about.
Why the Fed is showing up now
Private credit — loans made directly by non-bank funds to companies, outside both the syndicated bank-loan market and the high-yield bond market — has grown from a niche in the mid-2000s to something comparable in size to the two established credit channels. According to a New York Fed research explainer, the U.S. private credit market is now “approaching $1.3 trillion” and represents roughly 30% of below-investment-grade corporate debt, up from about 13% immediately after the 2008 crisis. The Fed pilot’s own reference point — that the direct-lending market matches the size of both the high-yield bond and broadly syndicated loan markets — underscores just how central this channel has become.
The problem, from a regulator’s perspective, is that public credit markets can be tracked in near real time through bond prices, loan indexes, CLO data and mutual-fund flows. Private credit deals do not trade. Terms are bilaterally negotiated. Marks are quarterly, model-driven, and inconsistent across managers. There is no equivalent of the Fed’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) for the direct-lending world, which means the Fed’s April 2025 Financial Stability Report had to lean on outside estimates when it noted that roughly 20% of market contacts cited private credit stress as a potential shock channel, as summarized by PYMNTS. Regulators are trying to build the SLOOS analogue before, not after, something breaks.
Bank exposure — the reason this survey matters beyond private credit
Private credit funds are not stand-alone islands. They finance a large share of their portfolios through subscription lines, back-leverage facilities and asset-based loans provided by the regulated banking system. The New York Fed’s explainer notes that the largest U.S. banks have extended roughly $95 billion in loans to private-credit lenders, and warns that “activities and related risks of banks and private credit funds are intimately interwoven.” Stress in the private-credit book can transmit back to the banking system through those funding lines, even without a single bank directly holding a private loan.
That interconnection is what makes a supposedly non-supervisory market-intelligence exercise consequential. If the pilot survey reveals that lending standards have deteriorated meaningfully across all three EBITDA buckets — more covenant-lite deals, higher leverage multiples, thinner equity cushions, more payment-in-kind (PIK) interest — that becomes an input to the Fed’s Financial Stability Report, to bank stress tests, and to how supervisors think about the credit lines banks extend to those same private credit managers.
What to watch
- Response rate. Voluntary surveys of private managers historically get patchy participation. If the biggest ten managers (Ares, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Blue Owl, HPS, Golub, Antares, Sixth Street, Oaktree) all participate, the survey will be representative of the upper end of the market. If they don’t, the pilot will skew toward the middle-market names that were already more willing to disclose.
- First disclosure, Q1 2027. The first published output will be aggregate only. Watch for whether the Fed reports headline dispersion (spreads, loan-to-value, leverage multiples) by EBITDA bucket, or only market-wide averages. The bucket-level view is where the interesting signal lives.
- Cadence. “Pilot” implies the Fed reserves the right to make this a standing quarterly survey, on the SLOOS model. If it does, private credit will have moved from opaque to semi-transparent in the space of two years.
- Industry pushback. Managers have historically argued that direct-lending marks and terms are proprietary. Expect a lobbying pattern that mirrors the mutual-fund industry’s response when the SEC extended liquidity-risk-management rules to open-end funds.
The pilot does not, on its own, add a single new regulation to private credit. What it does is close an information gap that has been the loudest complaint from Fed staff, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), and the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report for at least three years. Once the data exists, the policy conversation changes — because arguments about “the private credit market has never been tested in a downturn” get replaced with arguments about what the data actually shows.
Sources
- Reuters — Two regional Fed banks to launch pilot survey of private credit market (Aug 5, 2026)
- PYMNTS — Federal Reserve Readies Pilot Survey to Gauge Private Credit Markets (Aug 5, 2026)
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York — “NBFIs in Focus: The Basics of Private Credit” (Oct 17, 2025)
- Federal Reserve — Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS)
- Office of Financial Research — Measuring Counterparty Exposures to Private Credit (Mar 12, 2026)
Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.