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PRA Group was founded as Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC in March 1996 by Kevin Stevenson and Steve Fredrickson, who worked previously in collections at Household Finance. With a staff of four in Norfolk, Virginia, the company began to purchase debt in May 1996. In 2000, PRA purchased $ 1 billion of debt. Then operating as Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc., it was ranked as the tenth largest debt buyer in the United States.
In 2000, the company established a call center in Hutchinson, Kansas. 75 bill collectors worked from the Hutchinson call center in 2001. The main call center, which employed 380 collectors and supervisors, was located in the Riverside Commerce Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
In 2002, about 50% of the company's debt portfolio had come from major credit card issuers including Visa, MasterCard and Discover. The portfolio had a value of $4.7 billion, based on money owed by 1.5 million individual debtors. In 2002, PRA had 590 employees across all sites and divisions.
PRA went public on November 8, 2002. Its IPO raised $50.7 million through the sale of 3.9 million shares of its stock at $13./share. By February 2003, it was trading at 60% above its $13 offering price. A second stock offering in May 2003 consisted largely of sales by insiders; the cofounders of PRA and an officer of the company collectively cleared $12.2 million from the offering.
In April 2010, PRA secured a controlling interest in the company Claims Compensation Bureau, which specialized in "recovering funds and processing payments owed under class-action settlements ".
In 2013 PRA was listed in the Federal Trade Commission 's report on the debt buying industry as one of the top five debt buyers in the US. Based on SEC filings, PRA's revenue for 2017 was $813 million. In October 2014, the company name was changed from Portfolio Recovery Associates, Inc. to PRA Group, Inc.
In 2015 PRA Group acquired Aktiv Kapital, a Norway-based debt buyer and lender in Europe and Canada. In 2020, the company expanded into Australia.