A borrower in Cambodia who had fallen behind could, until the end of last year, still hold a loan that looked healthy on the lender’s books. The lender rewrote the terms so the borrower could keep paying, and left the loan at the grade it already had.
That was a temporary rule and it ran out on 31 December 2025. It came in a circular, which is a written instruction from the central bank to the lenders it supervises. Chea Serey signed and sealed the circular for the National Bank of Cambodia on 29 August 2024. The last line above her signature sets the relief running only to the end of December 2025.
It let a lender rewrite a struggling borrower’s loan twice over without moving the grade on it and without setting aside another dollar against the risk of not being repaid. The same treatment covered tourism loans in Siem Reap rewritten under an earlier circular dated 23 November 2023.
In April the National Bank published its supervision report for 2025. At the end of December, deposit-taking institutions, meaning the banks and lenders allowed to hold customers’ savings, carried 207,830 rewritten loan accounts worth $5.65 billion. That was 9 per cent of everything they had lent. Of it, $1.91 billion had stopped being paid on time.
The report counts every loan those lenders had rewritten. It does not count only the ones rewritten under the rule that was about to expire. The same section names two other sets of relief the bank issued during 2025, on 30 July and on 10 December, for people and soldiers hit by the border fighting with Thailand. Nothing in the report splits the total between them.
Across the whole banking system at that date, loans that had stopped being paid on time came to 8.6 per cent of all lending. After taking off the money lenders had already put aside against them, the figure was 2.4 per cent.
The bank’s report for the first half of 2026 puts the same measure at 9.6 per cent, and at 3.3 per cent after the money set aside. Xinhua reported the release on 28 July. Set against the end-2025 figures, the six-month move is 8.6 to 9.6 before the money set aside, and 2.4 to 3.3 after. That comparison is this desk’s own, made across the bank’s two reports.
The grading change and the rise sit inside the same six months. Nothing in the record separates a loan newly graded from a loan newly gone bad.
Lenders sort every loan into five grades. They run from normal at the top, through special mention, substandard and doubtful, down to loss, and the lender sets aside more money at each step down. The Khmer Times set that framework out on 25 August, reporting a letter dated 22 July in which the bank told lenders to stop extending the preferential treatment. The bank said the end of that treatment does not mean rewriting a loan is no longer allowed.
The rule the letter is described as ending had ended itself seven months earlier. The Khmer Times ran its report under a headline saying the bank ends the measures. The circular’s own last line had closed the relief on 31 December 2025.
The letter has not been published. Its date and its instruction reach the record through that report, and so does the fact that it gave five reasons. The report sets out some of the bank’s reasoning and does not enumerate the five, and no other published account of the letter read for this piece does either.
Every form the circular allowed is a way of easing somebody in difficulty. A lender could cut the principal, or cut the sum due at the end, or cut the rate on the contract. It could put off the principal or the interest, push back the final date, add or change the guarantor, or move the borrower between paying in instalments and paying in one lump at the end. Loans get rewritten because they are already in trouble, and nothing in the record measures how much of the $5.65 billion would have stopped being paid without the help.
The central bank published the $1.91 billion itself, in April. The International Monetary Fund published its 2025 report on Cambodia on 2 December. That report records the bank saying that going on with the measures masked weakness in the banking sector, and may have slowed the return of normal lending. The passage sits under the heading Authorities’ Views.
For a borrower who is paying late, the change is at the lender’s end. Until 31 December 2025 the lender could hold the loan where it was. The circular also stopped a lender, for as long as the relief ran, from making a customer’s rewriting record the main thing it decided a credit application on. That record sits at Credit Bureau (Cambodia), the company the circular names as holding it.
None of these documents says whether a grade changes what the borrower has to pay. None says whether a lender has called a loan in, or what may now be done with a rewriting record at the credit bureau. None gives a count of how many of the 207,830 accounts are behind, as against how much of the money.
The circular set out a way back up as well. A borrower who kept to the terms for three months running could have the loan lifted one grade, and then another, until it stood at normal again. That route closed with the rest of it on 31 December 2025.