Credit card limits 'worth £177bn'
Updated on 06 December 2007
The UK's 31.4 million credit cardholders have credit limits on their plastic collectively worth £176.9 billion.
The most common credit limit is between £2,501 and £5,000, with 11% of people able to spend this sum on their cards, according to financial website moneysupermarket.com.
At the same time nearly one in 10 people have a credit limit of £20,000, helping to push the average limit up to £5,630.
But the group added that most people had used up less than half of their credit limit, with the average outstanding debt on a card of just £2,060.
Rob Kenley, head of credit cards at moneysupermarket.com, said: "Our findings are worrying, yet encouraging at the same time.
"Almost four million cardholders could each get into over £20,000 of credit card debt yet the average outstanding balance for all cardholders is £2,060, suggesting consumers could be getting savvier about the perils of too much borrowing on plastic."
But he warned that if everybody ran up the maximum level of debt on their credit card, Britons would collectively owe nearly £177 billion.
YouGov questioned 1,994 people during November.
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