LOS ANGELES — U.S. credit card users are getting better about making more timely payments, even as banks are increasingly issuing cards to borrowers with less-than-stellar credit.

The rate of payments at least 90 days overdue dipped in the first three months of the year to 0.73 percent, credit reporting agency TransUnion said.

That's down from 0.78 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 and 0.74 percent in the first quarter of last year.

While the rate increased in the second half of last year, the broader trend has seen delinquency rates decline steadily since the last recession started toward the end of 2007, said Charlie Wise, TransUnion's director of research and consulting.

“We are now seeing that, when given a choice, consumers are overwhelmingly paying their bankcards before they're paying their mortgages,” Wise said.

Between 1999 and 2007, the average quarterly credit card delinquency rate was 1.30 percent, said TransUnion, which culled data from a random sampling of about 27 million credit reports.

While late payments are down, cardholders have been racking up more debt.

On average, borrowers had $4,962 in credit card debt in the January-to-March period. That's down 4.7 percent from the previous quarter.

The annual increase in average credit card debt is a shift from trends between 2009 and 2011, when borrowers pulled back on using credit and made an effort to slash their debt.