Two-thirds of company borrowing in Georgia is in foreign currency

At the end of June 2026 Georgian banks held 75.43 billion lari of loans, excluding lending between banks, having added about 1.3 billion lari during the month, or about 1.75% on the 74.13 billion of the month before. Annual growth, with exchange-rate effects stripped out, was 14.47% — credit expanding considerably faster than the economy it sits on. Households accounted for 40.11 billion lari, a little over half the book, and household credit alone grew by 701.19 million lari in June. Resident companies accounted for 32.83 billion.

Of that 32.83 billion lari of corporate lending, 11.41 billion was in lari and 21.42 billion in foreign currency — about 65.2% of company borrowing denominated in something other than the currency most of these companies earn in. The overall larization ratio for the loan book was 58.37%, so the household side is doing the heavy lifting on local-currency borrowing while the corporate side is not. In June, lari loans grew by 985.05 million and foreign-currency loans by 311.13 million, so the direction of travel is towards more lari — slowly.

Developers are companies, and companies here borrow in dollars and euros while selling, increasingly, in lari. If the lari weakens, the debt gets heavier in the currency the revenue arrives in, and the squeeze lands on the projects with the thinnest margins and the longest build times. For someone buying off-plan, that is the practical reason to look at the developer's balance sheet and completion record rather than only at the show flat: currency mismatch is one of the ordinary ways an unfinished building stops being finished. Ask what currency the purchase contract is denominated in, and what happens to your instalments if the rate moves.

The headline total, the household and corporate figures and the monthly changes come from National Bank of Georgia reporting. Some of the finer splits — the overall lari and foreign-currency totals of about 44.03 billion and 31.40 billion, and the household share of about 53.2% — are calculations made from that data by the publication rather than numbers the central bank published in that form. They are arithmetic rather than guesswork, but if you are going to quote a figure in a negotiation, take it from the National Bank's own statistics pages. Credit figures are revised, and a derived number is one step further from the source than a reported one.