NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans who have fallen at least 30 days behind on their home loan payments jumped 44% in the second quarter from a year ago, according to an industry report.

That puts delinquencies at a record 9.24% of mortgages, according to the National Delinquency Report from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). That represents more than 4 million of the 45 million borrowers covered by the report.

What the rate does not include, however, are loans already in foreclosure. Some 4.3% of all the mortgages are in that stage, up from 3.85% three months earlier and 1.55 percentage points from one year ago.

The combined percentage of loans past due and those already in foreclosure hit 13.16% during the quarter, the highest ever recorded by the MBA survey

“There was a major drop in foreclosures on subprime ARM loans,” said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist for the MBA, in a prepared statement. “The drop, however, was offset by increases in the foreclosure rates on the other types of loans, with prime fixed-rate loans having the biggest increase.”

Indeed, the MBA survey reported that prime, fixed-rate mortgages accounted for nearly one in every three foreclosure starts. That’s way up from a year ago, when only one of every five foreclosure start involved a prime loan.

That bodes ill for the future health of the mortgage market. Prime loans make up two-thirds of the mortgage market, and if delinquencies among these mortgages continue to proliferate, the number of foreclosures will soar.

Here, the Guardian adds more on the economy itself:

One of the difficulties facing lenders is that job losses continue to mount, with recession-hit employers cutting more than a quarter of a million positions each month. When mortgage customers lose their jobs, they no longer qualify for refinancing as they generally have no means of meeting even cut-price repayments.

A surprise drop in retail sales delivered a further blow to economic sentiment. Figures from the US department of commerce showed that till receipts dropped by 0.1% in July, confounding analysts’ expectations of a rise of between 0.7% and 0.8%. After stripping out car sales boosted by the government’s “cash for clunkers” subsidy programme, retail sales fell by 0.6%.