RDN Repossession Volume Report – Q3 2025

2025 On Course for The Highest Repossession Volume in Recorded History!

When the year began, I did not expect that it would exceed the awesome year of 2024. With repossession volume already exceeding pre-pandemic levels, I kind of assumed it would level off or even decrease a bit. Boy was I wrong! With the new data provided by John Sibbit and the folks at Recovery Database Network (RDN), it’s looking like records are about to be broken.

With the year two-thirds over, most of the guesswork on how the year is going is behind us; it’s slammin’! While I had expected it to be on par with 2024, I did not expect that it would exceed it.

Assignment Volume

According to RDN’s data, there were 2,515,938 unique repossession assignments received in the second quarter of the year. As previously provided data reported, RDN separates assignments down to the vehicle ID number so that no two assignments sent on the same vehicle are reported more than once.

RDN Repossession Volume Report – Q3 2025 — Click to enlarge

July started the quarter off strong with 837,878
August showed a minimal decrease to 821,755.
September showed a big increase with 856,305

3rd quarter assignment volume is traditionally, stronger than Q2, but this Q3 assignment volume was almost at the same level as Q1, the biggest quarter of the year! With assignment volume of $56K units below Q1, September was the third highest volume month this year, so far.

I had predicted that Q3 would end with 2,219,675 vehicles assigned and was once again, way off by 296K assignments higher.

These are, once again, unique repossession assignments, with no two assignments were sent on the same vehicle reported. But that discounts units assigned by forwarders who may assign the same unit to two or more agencies during the quarter.

With 66% or more assignments being handled by a forwarder through a tiered assignment strategy, the actual amount of agency received assignments could be more than double this in actual volume received by agencies.

Recovery Ratios

Well publicized by both RDN and the CFPB, repossession recovery ratios (number of units recovered vs. number assigned) has been down since well before the pandemic. Going from a reported 41% in 2018 to a low of 27% in 2022 and 2023, it is an area of efficiency that should be a higher concern for all. Repossession assignment volume is meaningless unless the collateral is being recovered and as can be seen, these number have barely improved over the past three years.

But the good news is, according to RDN, in Q3 of 2025, this ratio improved to 30.58%. It is progress but it is still a far cry from the CFPB’s reported rate of 41% for the periods of January 2018 to April of 2021 which should be the benchmark for a return to reasonable efficiency.

Repossession Volume

With the 3^rd Quarter recovery ratio improved, Q3 ended with a whopping 769,295 repossessions.

July was the highest one month volume of 2025 with 261,431
August showed a reduction, but was still the fourth highest volume month of the year so far with 250,682 units recovered.
September picked back up to the third highest with 257,182

I had only predicted this quarter to provide 650,362 repossessions and the actuals far exceeded the average 22% of the year’s total recoveries.

Looking Ahead

According to the old and now almost irrelevant Cox Automotive model, Quarters 1-3 traditionally provided 70% of all of a year’s repossessions. With only a couple of years RDN data behind us, I’ll continue to stick with these averages. If the remaining 30% of the year’s repossession volume comes in Q4, we should see a record setting year.

Assignments:

Q4 – With another 30% of the year’s volume coming at us, we can expect another 3,026,830 assignments ahead of us.

If all of this goes as expected, 2025 will show to be the busiest year the repossession industry has ever seen on record. If all goes as expected, we will end the year with 10,537,537 assignments.

This would be the highest number of assignments on record! Considering my other estimates were low, it could very well end much higher than that.

Repossessions:

Q4 – Once again sticking with the Cox Auto average of 30% of annual repossession volume occurring in this quarter, it would end with 820,236 vehicles repossessed. This would be the highest Q4 since 2009, during the Great Recession.

Unless assignment volume takes a nosedive in Q4, I believe we should expect to finish 2025 as the the highest volume repossession year on record.

Conclusions:

While finding conclusive and consistent repossession data continues to be elusive, this is the best empirical data set of repossession assignment, recovery and efficiency available to my knowledge.

With RDN (Openlane) receiving an estimated 90% of all repossession assignments, the numbers are actually a little light as they won’t account for the other assignment portals or assignments that are assigned to small agencies.

Having researched every available data source out there, there is just no way to capture every assignment between a small repo agency or tow company and car dealer. Even trying to capture the number of agencies is near impossible. According to RDN, in 2024, they had about 1,700 different companies recover vehicles through their portal.

When I reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for Q3 2024 number of repossession agencies as 861 with 7,358 employees, it demonstrated just how scattered and fractured the numbers are even for the Federal government. With repossession volume as high as it is, I suspect that the number of new entries into the repossession field, as well as traditionally tow only companies, has grown massively.

Of course, developing empirical data for this industry is not perfect science, but it is getting better. We at least now have some solid method of measuring the aggregate health of the auto repossession industry and lending community and all of the important elements of this industry that rely on it.

Once again, I would like to thank John Sibbit and the awesome team at RDN for continuing to share this data with us. Their contribution to the recovery industry is priceless!