Roughly $875 billion of commercial and multifamily mortgage debt, 17% of all outstanding balances, is scheduled to mature in 2026, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s loan maturity survey. That figure is actually down 9% from the $957 billion that came due in 2025, and the MBA’s own framing is that the market is moving past the peak of the maturity wave. The problem is what happens at the wall now that lenders have stopped kicking loans down the road.
For 2 years, extend and pretend was the industry’s pressure valve: push the maturity, modify the terms, and wait for rates to fall. Rates did not fall far enough. This post breaks down how the wall got built, the evidence that lender behavior has turned, where the distress is concentrated by property type, and the refinance math a borrower with a maturing loan should be running right now.
How the Wall Got Built
The mechanics are straightforward. Loans originated in the low-rate window of 2019 through 2021 carried coupons in the low-to-mid 4s; CoStar pegs average coupons on maturing loans at 4.1% to 4.7%. When the Federal Reserve pushed rates up in 2022 and 2023, refinancing at prevailing coupons stopped penciling for a large share of those borrowers, so lenders extended. Each extension moved balances from one year’s maturity column into the next, which is why scheduled maturities have stayed historically elevated even as origination slowed.
That history matters for reading the 2026 number. The wall is not growing anymore; it is rolling forward and compounding in the sectors that cannot refinance. S&P Global, cited by CoStar, expects cumulative scheduled maturities to peak at $1.26 trillion in 2027 before receding.
Lenders Are No Longer Simply Extending
The clearest signal came from the MBA itself. Releasing the maturity survey at its 2026 CREF convention, chief economist Mike Fratantoni called 2025 “a transition year” and noted that even though longer-term rates were little changed, “lenders were no longer simply extending loan terms.”
The payoff data backs him up. A January 2026 Morningstar DBRS analysis, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Real Deal, found that more than half of the roughly $100 billion of securitized commercial mortgages coming due in 2026 are unlikely to pay off at maturity. Payoff rates topped 80% in 2023 and ran near 75% in 2024 and 2025, so the expected non-payoff share has roughly doubled. Meanwhile, close to $25 billion of CMBS loans now sit past their maturity date without repayment, liquidation, or a formal extension, per Trepp, a level not seen since the post-2008 cleanup.
For a borrower, the practical translation: the maturity date on the loan documents means something again, and the burden of proof at the extension conversation has shifted from the lender to the sponsor.
Where the Distress Sits
The pain is not evenly distributed. Trepp’s January 2026 data puts the office CMBS delinquency rate at 12.34%, the highest reading since the firm began tracking in 2000. The stock of already-matured office debt looks worse: CoStar reported in September 2025 that 83.7% of office CMBS loans that matured before 2026 and still have balances outstanding are delinquent, and 92.7% of that matured universe sits in special servicing.
The middle of the table is deteriorating more quietly. Overall CMBS delinquency reached 7.47% in January, with multifamily at 6.94% and retail at 7.04%. Multifamily’s number deserves attention because the sector’s fundamentals are broadly healthy; its delinquencies are mostly a capital structure problem, floating-rate bridge debt and 2021-2022 vintage deals underwritten to rent growth that never arrived. Industrial remains the exception at 0.62%.
The Refi Math Borrowers Are Facing
Two forces hit a maturing loan at once: the coupon resets up, and the value marks down. Per Northmarq’s July 15, 2026 rate sheet, the 10-year Treasury sits at 4.61%, putting agency multifamily coupons at roughly 5.7% to 6.2%, life company money at 5.8% to 6.8%, and CMBS at 6.3% to 6.9%. Against a maturing coupon in the low 4s, that is a 150 to 250 bps reset.
The proceeds math shows why that reset bites. A stabilized property with $1MM of NOI supported roughly $13.6MM of debt at a 4.25% coupon on 30-year amortization and a 1.25x DSCR ($1MM ÷ 1.25 = $800,000 of debt service capacity, ÷ the 5.90% annual constant). Run the same NOI at a 6.35% coupon and the 7.47% constant supports about $10.7MM, a 21% proceeds haircut before any change in value. (For how coverage tests drive sizing, see our post on DSCR.)
Values compound the gap. MSCI’s RCA CPPI shows national all-property values down 6.2% over the 3 years through December 2025, with CBD office down 42.7% and apartments down 13.7% over the same window. The one piece of good news in that report: national values were essentially flat in 2025, up 0.2%, which suggests the marks are finding a bottom.
Distress Is Also a Bid
Capital is forming against exactly this pipeline. Brookfield raised $16 billion for its latest opportunistic real estate fund as of mid-2025, telling the Journal it was buying at 20% to 40% below peak values, and Starwood closed its Distressed Opportunity Fund XIII at $10.2 billion on July 1, 2026. Much of what will trade out of the maturity wall is not broken real estate; it is overleveraged real estate with functioning operations, which is why discounted baskets of it attract institutional money.
Some strategists also argue that public equity valuations, with the Shiller CAPE ratio at 41.5 against a dot-com peak of 44.2, will likely push some allocators toward real assets at reset pricing. That is a forecast, not a fact, but the fundraising totals above are real, and they set a floor under forced sales.
What a Borrower With a 2026-2027 Maturity Should Do
Start the process 12 months out, not 90 days. The single most useful number a sponsor can know is the refi gap: what today’s NOI supports at today’s coupons and coverage tests, versus the balance coming due. If proceeds cover the payoff, the exercise costs nothing. If they do not, the earlier the gap is quantified, the more options remain open: a cash-in refinance, mezzanine or preferred equity to bridge the shortfall, a negotiated extension with a paydown, or a sale while the distress bid is deep and getting deeper. Sponsors who arrive at the lender conversation with the math already done consistently get better outcomes than those who wait for the servicer’s letter.
Future Outlook
The maturity wall is a 2026-2027 story with a defined shape: scheduled maturities peak next year, lender patience has visibly thinned, and the office and overleveraged-multifamily buckets will produce most of the forced outcomes. If long rates hold near current levels, expect payoff rates to stay depressed, transaction volume to rise as the bid-ask spread closes, and the best-capitalized buyers to do very well out of other people’s capital structures. For borrowers, the era of the automatic extension is over; for investors, the discount window the industry has talked about for 3 years is finally, measurably, open.
At Fident Capital, we work with owners and developers to size refinances, structure gap capital, and place bridge and permanent debt across the capital markets. If a maturity is coming due in the next 18 months, the right time to run the numbers is now.
Sources
1. Mortgage Bankers Association, 2025 CRE Survey of Loan Maturity Volumes (Feb 9, 2026) — https://newslink.mba.org/mba-newslinks/2026/february/mba-newslink-tuesday-feb-10-2026/17-of-commercial-and-multifamily-mortgage-balances-to-mature-in-2026/
2. The Real Deal, “CMBS Delinquencies Hit Record With $25B Past Maturity” (Feb 17, 2026, citing Morningstar DBRS and Trepp) — https://therealdeal.com/national/2026/02/17/cmbs-delinquencies-hit-record-with-25b-past-maturity/
3. Trepp, “CMBS Delinquency Rate Increased to Open 2026” (Feb 2026) — https://www.trepp.com/trepptalk/cmbs-delinquency-rate-increased-to-open-2026
4. CRE Daily, “Office Loan Delinquency Hits Record High” (Feb 2026) — https://www.credaily.com/briefs/office-loans-delinquency-hits-record-high/
5. CoStar, “Why Commercial Property Pros Say a Looming $1.26 Trillion Debt Wall Can Be Scaled” (Sept 24, 2025) — https://www.costar.com/article/1122236114/why-commercial-property-pros-say-a-looming-1-26-trillion-debt-wall-can-be-scaled
6. MSCI, RCA CPPI US National All-Property Index (Jan 22, 2026) — https://www.msci.com/downloads/web/msci-com/research-and-insights/paper/rca-commercial-property-price-indexes-rca-cppi/2601_RCACPPI_US.pdf
7. Northmarq, Rates & Spreads (July 15, 2026) — https://www.northmarq.com/insights/rates-spreads
8. CRE Daily, “Distressed Properties Drive Brookfield to Record $16B Fundraise” (May 8, 2025, citing The Wall Street Journal) — https://www.credaily.com/briefs/distressed-properties-drive-brookfield-to-record-16b-fundraise/
9. Starwood Capital Group, “Starwood Capital Group Raises $10.2 Billion Opportunistic Real Estate Fund” (July 1, 2026) — https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/starwood-capital-group-raises-10-2-billion-opportunistic-real-estate-fund-302815286.html
10. multpl.com, Shiller PE Ratio — https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
