(DCNF)—Hundreds of billions of dollars in apartment debt is coming due as property owners confront higher borrowing costs, weaker rents in some markets and refinancing terms that could force borrowers to inject fresh cash or sell.
Roughly $297 billion in multifamily mortgages are scheduled to mature in 2026, representing about 13% of the $2.3 trillion in multifamily loans tracked by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Another $223 billion comes due in 2027, followed by roughly $237 billion in both 2028 and 2029.
The stakes extend beyond property owners. In markets where landlords cannot raise rents enough to offset higher financing and operating costs, the pressure could instead show up through weaker property cash flow, reduced spending on maintenance or renovations, property sales and, in some cases, delinquency.
The bigger concern, however, may not be the amount of debt maturing but whether apartment properties financed when rates were much lower can support the same amount of borrowing under current market conditions.
“From our perspective, the volume of multifamily debt coming due isn’t the core issue. The refinance gap is,” a Trepp spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in emailed comments. “Many owners who borrowed when rates were low can still cover their interest payments but can’t refinance at maturity without putting in significant new equity.”
The pressure is particularly concentrated among interest-only and floating-rate loans, according to Trepp. Multifamily commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) delinquencies rose 46 basis points to 7.69% in July as loans in Ohio, Texas and New York became delinquent, according to a Trepp report.
Trepp separately reported that 30 multifamily CMBS loans totaling $509.3 million became newly delinquent during July. Ten loans totaling $214.1 million were backed by older Sun Belt properties, where declining occupancy contributed to stress.
Mortgage Bankers Association Chief Economist Mike Fratantoni told the DCNF that higher interest rates are only part of the challenge facing apartment owners.
“In addition [to] the challenge of higher interest rates, multifamily property owners also face challenging fundamentals with flat to declining effective rents in a number of markets, particularly in the sunbelt and elevated vacancy rates,” Fratantoni said. “At the same time, expenses including insurance costs are high. This pressure on NOI is reflected in lower property values relative to a few years ago.”
Net operating income, or NOI, is the income a property generates after operating expenses but before debt payments and taxes. Falling NOI can lower a property’s value and reduce the amount lenders are willing to refinance.
“Lenders are requiring more equity in situations where values have declined, and also are carefully underwriting to ensure there is sufficient debt service coverage,” Fratantoni said.
The refinancing crunch follows the disruption of the COVID-19 era, when federal eviction moratoriums temporarily limited landlords’ ability to remove tenants for nonpayment. Congress imposed a 120-day moratorium in 2020 on certain federally backed properties, followed by a broader Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium that the Supreme Court ended in August 2021.
The moratoriums affected rental collections for some owners, but the more direct driver of today’s refinancing squeeze is that loans originated or extended during the low-rate period must now be financed at substantially higher borrowing costs. The higher-rate environment also pushed some loans that otherwise may have refinanced into extensions or modifications, leaving more debt to mature in subsequent years, according to the MBA.
Trepp’s research illustrates the gap. An analysis of second-half 2026 CMBS maturities found that about 52% of the multifamily balance in its sample would require some amount of borrower cash to refinance under Trepp’s assumptions, while 41% would require an equity contribution of at least 20%.
The risk was disproportionately concentrated in interest-only loans, which do not pay down principal during the loan term. Trepp found that across property types, 80% of the interest-only loan balance in its sample would require some new equity to refinance.
A more recent Trepp analysis found that 36% of CMBS hard maturities due in 2026 carried debt yields at or below 8%, a segment the firm identified as more likely to face refinancing friction.
For apartment owners, however, the consequences of refinancing pressure will differ significantly by property and market. Trepp told the DCNF that landlords in areas with substantial new apartment supply often cannot simply pass higher costs on to renters, meaning the strain can instead appear through weaker cash flow and reduced capital spending.
Fratantoni cautioned that refinancing stress does not necessarily mean trouble for tenants, particularly if a property changes hands at a price that reflects current financing conditions.
“If a property gets a new owner, who purchases at the current market value and gets financing at current market rates underwritten to current market conditions, the property, and hence the renters, should be in good shape,” Fratantoni said.
The strain in commercial real estate also comes as households and businesses carry historically large amounts of debt. U.S. household debt stood at $18.8 trillion at the end of the second quarter, including $13.1 trillion in mortgage balances, $1.26 trillion in credit card debt and $1.71 trillion in auto loans, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Other forms of consumer financing have also expanded. Sixteen percent of adults used buy now, pay later financing in 2025, up from 10% in 2021, while 26% of users reported making at least one late payment during the year, according to the Federal Reserve.
Businesses are carrying large debt loads as well. Nonfinancial corporate debt reached $15.7 trillion in the second quarter and grew at a 5.5% annualized pace during the quarter, according to Federal Reserve data.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.