What HMDA is

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 requires most mortgage lenders to keep a register of the applications they receive and the loans they make or buy, and to report it each year. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau writes the rule (Regulation C), the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council collects the filings, and the data are published so that the public and regulators can see whether lenders are serving their communities' housing needs.

Who reports

Banks, savings associations, credit unions and non-depository mortgage companies report if they have an office in a metropolitan area and originated at least 25 closed-end mortgages in each of the two preceding years (or 200 open-end lines of credit). Smaller and rural-only lenders are exempt, so a county's total on this site can miss loans made by very small institutions. In 2024, 4,716 institutions reported at least 25 applications.

What each record contains

One row per application or purchased loan: the lender's Legal Entity Identifier, the property's state, county and census tract, the action taken (originated, approved but not accepted, denied, withdrawn, closed for incompleteness, purchased, or a preapproval request), the loan purpose (home purchase, home improvement, refinancing, cash-out refinancing, other), the loan type (conventional, FHA, VA, USDA), the loan amount, and, for originated loans, the rate spread over the average prime offer rate. Denied applications carry up to four denial reasons. Records also include applicant demographics, income and credit-decision fields that this site does not tabulate by lender.

How it is published

Each spring the FFIEC publishes a modified loan/application register for every lender, then a national snapshot with every record for the year. The "one-year" snapshot is what this site uses; a "three-year" file with later resubmissions follows. Public files are modified to protect privacy: loan amounts are rounded, ages are bucketed and some fields are removed. No names of applicants, borrowers or loan officers are ever included.

What the files do not tell you

HMDA does not record credit scores in a usable form, loan-to-value ratios for every record, the reason an applicant withdrew, or whether a denied applicant later got a loan elsewhere. That is why the CFPB says the data alone cannot be used to determine whether a lender is complying with fair lending laws. See what a denial rate does and does not mean.