Net hryvnia loans to businesses and households have grown rapidly for two consecutive years, rising more than one-third in 2025, according to the Q4 Banking Sector Review.
Active lending consistently drove the growth in the banking sector’s net assets, which were up 11% in Q4 and 17.2% in 2025.
The volume of net hryvnia loans to businesses rose briskly throughout the year. Such a rapid, sustainable recovery is what sets today’s lending dynamics apart from past crises. This contrast is the result of ensuring financial stability and implementation of the Lending Development Strategy.
Loans to SMEs continue to dominate the hryvnia business portfolio. They have been growing by more than one-third per year. A revival of lending to state-owned companies, primarily in the energy sector, made a tangible contribution to portfolio growth. FX lending also picked up in H2 2025.
All groups of banks built up their loan portfolios during the year, foreign banks most actively of all. By maturity, loans of more than three years grew the fastest. By industry, the biggest increase was in loans to companies in wholesale trade, agriculture, foodstuffs, and financial services, as well as to enterprises in the machine-building and energy sectors, in particular the defense industrial base.
“We’ve made solid progress implementing our Lending Development Strategy. This is evident in particular from the indicator of net business loans penetration into the economy. This metric returned to growth in 2024 after a decade-long stagnation in lending and surged to 8.7% in 2025,” said NBU Governor Andriy Pyshnyy. “Indeed, net business loans penetration is still below the level of 2014, but at that time it was fueled by a credit bubble that grew out of massive insider lending and burst with a bang in the 2014–2015 crisis, causing huge losses. Now, the banking system is bolstering the economy rather than amplifying shocks that hit it. Over time, this support will help restore pre-war credit penetration rates without excessive risks. The NBU will further maintain a balance between the need to ensure the stability of the system and the need to boost its lending potential, and the system will retain its speed of development and its standard of quality.”
Implementation of the Lending Development Strategy has also contributed to the revival of unsubsidized lending. During 2025, market-based loans grew at four times the pace of subsidized ones, while the loans made under the 5–7–9% program shrank as a share of the hryvnia business portfolio to 30%.
The increase in net hryvnia loans to households picked up to 33.9% over the year, with mortgage growth accelerating to 35.8%. As usual, mortgages were driven by loans issued under the eOselia program. Car loan volumes are markedly higher than before.
In December, the NPL ratio shrank to its lowest in more than 15 years (13.9%). The rate of business borrower defaults on hryvnia loans remained below its pre-full-scale-war average of 3%.
Bank liabilities grew 12.3% qoq and 16.1% yoy due to deposit inflows from businesses and households. The acceleration of the growth in business deposits last quarter came as a repeat of a pattern seen in previous years.
The share of term deposits remained almost unchanged for the quarter, at 33.8%, while the dollarization rate of household deposits dropped to 33.2% (in a downtrend that has been ongoing for the third straight quarter).
Market rates on hryvnia loans to businesses rose for awhile in November, but fell as soon as December to 15.2% per annum, up only 0.5 pp from the start of the year. Rates on loans to households increased 1.3 pp during the quarter to 28.7% per annum.
According to pre-annual-audit data, the banks made UAH 126.8 billion in profit in 2025, almost half of it earned by state-owned banks. Net interest income remained the core driver of profit thanks to the stable yield on loans and portfolio growth. Profits grew relative to last year primarily because the hiked tax rate of 50% expired. However, the tax rate hike is coming back in 2026. Meanwhile, the sector’s return on equity as measured by pre-tax profit continued to decline, to 50% in 2025, down from 52.4% in 2024 and 58.6% in 2023.
Over the course of 2025, the banking sector’s regulatory capital rose, propping up the banks’ capacity to build up loan volumes.
The NBU continues to implement regulatory changes in accordance with European standards. It launched a regular resilience assessment at the beginning of 2026.
Data on loans and deposits published in the Banking Sector Review differs from the corresponding data posted in the Monetary Statistics section of the NBU’s official website, because the former:
- contains information on the banks that were solvent as of the reporting date unless indicated otherwise
- includes data from bank subsidiaries operating abroad
- contains data on deposits in other resident and non-resident banks
- has been adjusted for loan loss provisions unless clearly stated otherwise
- contains data on personal certificates of deposit unless indicated otherwise
- contains information on non-resident clients.
To correctly assess lending dynamics, it is important to analyze net loans, as the gross indicator contains a significant amount of NPLs, which distorts the picture. For example, write-offs by state-owned banks of legacy NPLs in December 2025 led to a considerable reduction in the gross loan portfolio, but it was not an actual decrease in lending.