One of the important concerns in the banking system is the occurrence of bank arrears, which will cause the inefficiency of the financial system and its spread to other sectors of the economy. Macroeconomic conditions such as business cycles can change the volume of bank arrears and cause damage to banks by changing the repayment power of customers. Therefore, in this research, it is tried to identify the factors affecting bank arrears, especially the role of business cycles, to provide the basis for reducing bank arrears and credit risk control. In this regard, the quarterly data of the country's economy during the period of 1999 to 2021 and the estimation of vector error correction model (VECM) have been used to identify the factors affecting bank arrears. The filter method of Cristiano Fitzgerald has been used to extract the variable of business cycles. The results of the vector error correction model show that there is a balanced relationship between the research variables and any imbalance between the research variables will disappear in the long term. The results show that the variables of business cycle and free exchange rate have a negative effect and the variables of liquidity, inflation and oil and gas income have a positive effect on the ratio of non-performing loans (NPL) to total facilities (bank arrears index). Also, the results of the variance analysis of bank arrears show that the variable of the ratio of non-current claims in the short term and long term explains ۵۸ and 28 percent of its changes, respectively. The variable of business cycles has the largest share in short-term and long-term changes in bank arrears as an independent variable, and it has the largest share in the short-term and long-term changes of non-current receivables ratio by 19.1% and 49.1%, respectively. Therefore, it is recommended to carry out more studies to identify this phenomenon and predict the results of the implementation of different policies to set the amount of bank arrears at the optimal level.