Posted on 05/29/25
| News Source: Maryland Matters
Annapolis, MD - May 29, 2025 - A second bond-rating agency has reaffirmed its highest credit rating for Maryland, helping offset a downgrade by a third agency just weeks before a scheduled $1.7 billion bond sale by the state.
The AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s follows a similar rating from Fitch two weeks ago. Standard & Poor’s — one of three firms that Maryland hires to rate its creditworthiness in advance of annual bond sales — issued its rating with a stable outlook for the state, but also with a warning.
“The stable outlook reflects our expectation that the state will make timely adjustments to achieve a structural balance and adequate cash reserves by proactively managing economic and budgetary risks that arise,” the report said.
The back-to-back AAA ratings from Fitch and Standard & Poor’s help take the sting out of Moody’s report, which downgraded the state from Aaa for the first time in more than 50 years, to Aa1. But state officials note that Moody’s has downgraded several other jurisdictions in the region recently — including the United States — and say the latest ratings prove that Maryland’s financial health is strong.
“The Fitch and S&P ratings reaffirmed what we have been saying all along about the state’s sound fiscal management and ability to adapt to an ever-changing federal bureaucracy,” state Treasurer Dereck Davis (D) said through a spokesperson Wednesday morning.
The report comes before a June 11 sale of nearly $1.7 billion in bonds. Money raised in the sale will be used by the state to pay for large infrastructure projects, including school construction.
At a press conference in Baltimore Wednesday, Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) called the earlier Moody’s rating an “outlier” that reflected a “Trump-based downgrade.”
“It’s very clear because of what happened with the United States and the bonds of the United States now being downgraded – just, unfortunately, the same way that Maryland was with Moody’s,” Ferguson said. “I think that Fitch and S&P made clearly the right choice — that not only is it triple ‘A,’ but we are stable because we make hard choices when we need to in order to grow our economy.”