Methodology
People make financial decisions with these numbers, so every definition, limit and rounding rule is on this page. If something here cannot be computed honestly, Fat Boy Data does not publish it.
Where the data comes from
Every figure derives from Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) loan-level filings published by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, covering 2023 to 2025. Lenders covered by HMDA file one row per application: the loan amount, purpose, lien position, whether the property is owner-occupied or an investment, the action taken, and the census tract. Branch locations come from the FDIC institution directory (banks) and the NCUA credit union branch file. Analysis is ours. See data sources.
Definitions
| Decided | An application that ended in an approval, an origination, or a denial. Withdrawn and incomplete applications are excluded because they say nothing about whether the lender would have said yes. |
|---|---|
| Approval rate | Applications approved (originated, plus approved but not accepted) divided by applications decided. |
| Borrower take-up | Loans originated divided by applications approved. A lender that approves everyone and funds almost nobody is quoting terms people walk away from, which is why this column exists. |
| Typical loan | The median loan amount. For a single lender this is the median of the loans it originated. For a market it is the median across lenders, weighted by how many loans each one made — not a loan-level median, because that is not derivable from what is published to us in aggregate. |
| Active lenders | Institutions that decided at least one application of that type in that place. |
| Rankable lenders | Lenders with at least 20 decided applications. |
Loan amounts are $10,000 brackets
Federal law requires HMDA loan amounts to be published as the midpoint of a $10,000 range. A typical loan shown as $85,000 means the bracket around $85,000, and a minimum of $5,000 means somewhere between $0 and $10,000. No amount on this site is exact to the dollar, and none should be read as a quote.
How small samples are handled
A lender that approved its only application has a 100% approval rate, and it must never outrank a lender that approved 82 of 102. So a lender needs 20 decided applications before it can be cited for a “highest approval rate” claim. Below that it still appears in the table, marked Limited sample.
Two further exclusions apply to editorial rankings only. Wholesale lenders never win a ranking, because a borrower cannot apply to a broker-only channel at all; they are shown marked Broker only. And a lender whose borrower take-up is under 70% is not cited as a top approver, because approving nearly everyone while funding few of them is not the same as being easy to borrow from.
Geography
HMDA is published at census-tract resolution by law, never by address. County figures are the sum of the tracts in that county. ZIP figures assign each tract to the ZIP code holding most of its land area, using the Census ZCTA relationship file — tracts and ZIP codes do not nest cleanly, so a ZIP figure is a close approximation, not a boundary-exact count. Nothing on this site is ever presented for an individual property.
Connecticut replaced its counties with planning regions in 2022 and HMDA changed over mid-series, so Connecticut markets are built from 2025 and the year before it only.
What this data cannot tell you
An approval rate is not a lender policy. Credit decisions turn on the borrower: credit score, debt-to-income, loan-to-value, income. Underwriting by geography would be redlining, which is illegal. What an approval rate measures is the joint outcome of who applied in an area and how they were treated. Read it as “who has said yes to people around here”, never as “who will say yes to me”.
Coverage is 616 counties, about 79.6% of the US population. A lender's figures on this site describe its lending inside that footprint, not its entire national book.
Data period 2023–2025. Last updated August 2026.