Your Car Loan Is Being Sold. If It Were a Mortgage, Federal Law Would Hand You 60 Protected Days.

If your car payment goes to Regional Acceptance, your loan is being sold.

Your rate doesn’t change. Your term doesn’t change. What changes is where the money goes, and that’s the part that can put a 30-day late on your credit report for a payment you actually made.

Truist agreed on September 15 to sell $5.5 billion of auto loans, described in its own investor slide as “substantially all assets of Regional Acceptance Corporation (RAC).” Closing is “anticipated in late 3Q26 or early 4Q26.” The bank expects $5.2 billion in net proceeds and a $535 million reserve release.

Regional Acceptance is Truist’s subprime and near-prime auto arm. Its own site says it runs 42 states out of Greenville, North Carolina, through 12 regional business centers and four customer service centers. Truist’s slide files the whole thing under “non-core, less profitable.” Its CFO, Mike Maguire, described it as “largely a national, loan-only platform.”

Translation: you were never a relationship. You were a yield. The yield is now worth more to somebody else.

Truist didn’t say how many borrowers are in the box, and its slide doesn’t even name the buyer. So do the arithmetic yourself. The Fed puts the average amount financed at auto finance companies at $41,705 in the second quarter of 2026, and that figure is for new cars. Regional Acceptance writes mostly used, credit-challenged paper, so the average balance runs lower and the head count runs higher. Divide $5.5 billion by $41,705 and you get about 132,000 loans. Treat that as the floor.

Here’s what they don’t tell you

If this were your mortgage, federal law would catch you. Regulation X says that “during the 60-day period beginning on the effective date of transfer of the servicing of any mortgage loan,” a payment that reaches the old servicer on time “may not be treated as late for any purpose.” Your old servicer has to warn you 15 days before the handoff. Your new one has to write within 15 days after.

Read that rule again. It says mortgage loan.

Car loans are not covered. No federal 60-day shield. No mandatory advance notice. No automatic late-fee protection. If your autopay keeps firing at a company that no longer owns your note, and the new owner marks the month unpaid, you are arguing from a standing start with a subprime servicer you never chose.

As of this week, Regional Acceptance’s homepage carried no notice about any of this. It still pitches the app, the payment portal, and automatic payments, and it still advertises the Truist affiliation.

Do this now

Screenshot four numbers today: balance, payoff amount, interest rate, and due date. If anything moves after the transfer, that screenshot is your evidence.

Don’t assume autopay follows the loan. The authorization you signed sits with Regional Acceptance. When a notice arrives naming a new servicer, set autopay up there, watch the first pull clear, then turn the old one off. In that order.

Pull your credit reports about 60 days after the close at annualcreditreport.com. You want one tradeline, not two, and no late marks you know you didn’t earn. Dispute anything wrong in writing.

Your contract is fine. A sale doesn’t rewrite it. If you want to see what killing this loan early actually saves, run it through our loan calculator, and if your credit has improved enough to refinance out of subprime paper, start at our loans hub and best loan picks.

The terms are not the risk here. The handoff is.

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