Phnom Penh Property in 2026: Reading Cambodia's Credit Data

Cambodia's banking regulator released fresh small business credit data for early 2026, and for anyone weighing property in Phnom Penh it repays a careful read. The National Bank of Cambodia reports the national rate of loans ninety or more days overdue at 7.7 percent, the highest on its record. Read as a single figure, that number invites caution across the whole country. Read properly, it says something more useful: Cambodia is no longer one market, and the capital does not behave like the coast.

A market of submarkets

The headline rate hides a wide spread beneath it. By region, the Plain, which contains Phnom Penh, holds the lowest reading in the country at 6.7 percent, while the areas around Siem Reap and the north-east sit near or above 10 percent, according to the National Bank of Cambodia. Construction lending tells the sharpest version of the same story. Overdue construction loans run at 19.4 percent on the coast around Sihanoukville, against 9.6 percent in Phnom Penh. Same country, same currency, same rules, and two very different risk environments.

Why the capital holds firm

Capital cities tend to fall less in a downturn and recover sooner than secondary towns. The buyer base is deeper and spread across more industries, and the resale market is more liquid, so an owner who needs to sell can still find a price. Phnom Penh's economy rests on formal employment in manufacturing and services rather than on tourist arrivals, which gives rental demand and resale pricing a steadier floor. For anyone buying on the secondary market, that liquidity is the point: an asset you can exit matters as much as one you can let.

Where the distress sits

Sihanoukville's high overdue rate is the delayed accounting of an earlier building boom, much of it financed against gaming and offshore demand that never arrived at the scale the loans assumed. Many of those projects are unfinished or built to no clear standard, and that overhang has to clear before any broad recovery means much. For a foreign buyer, distress of this kind is not automatically opportunity. Some of it will surface through auctions and urgent resale, but it needs project-level due diligence, not a bet on a headline discount.

Encouragingly, the banking system itself is well provisioned, holding reserves against most of its bad loans, and the pandemic-era rules that let lenders defer recognising distress expired at the end of 2025, so the current numbers are the cleanest read in years. The practical lesson is to price each district and each building against its own conditions. We run that submarket analysis before a client commits, because in a market like this the work rarely looks urgent and usually decides the outcome.