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Method

How the mortgage figures are made

How the pages of the Mortgage lending hub read what their publishers put out, and what that record can and cannot say. The method every topic shares — where a figure comes from, snapshots, freshness and corrections — is on the site’s methodology page.

What a count is

Every figure is computed by this site’s SQL over the CFPB’s loan-level file. An application is a record whose action is one of the five a lender takes on one: loan originated, approved but not accepted, denied, withdrawn, or closed for incompleteness. A denial rate is denials over the applications decided (originated, approved or denied), and every page prints that base beside the rate. Purchased loans and preapproval requests are counted beside the applications and never in them. An application is not a household: one household can apply to several lenders.

Small cells: this site’s rule

The CFPB publishes no minimum count for a breakdown. Its disclosure policy (84 FR 649) protects privacy by altering the loan-level file, and sets no threshold. So this site sets its own: a race, ethnicity or sex breakdown is shown only where its whole, a county, a lender, or a lender in a county, has at least 50 applications; a category under 10 prints “under 10”, and beside a lone one the next-smallest category is withheld too, so neither can be worked out from the whole; and no rate is printed on fewer than 50 decisions.

Which release each year is read from

The CFPB publishes each year’s file three times, each fuller than the last, and its Data Browser reads the fullest. So does this site: 2018, Three Year; 2019, Three Year; 2020, Three Year; 2021, Three Year; 2022, Three Year; 2023, One Year; 2024, One Year; 2025, Snapshot. A later release can add to a year, with lenders’ resubmissions and late filings. Each state’s count of every action is held to the CFPB’s aggregation API for every year, at zero tolerance, before the data is committed: 8 years here.

What this data cannot show

  • An application is not a household: one household can apply to several lenders, and a purchased loan was made by someone else. Counts are of applications.
  • A withheld cell is withheld. A race, ethnicity or sex breakdown is shown only where its whole has 50 applications; a category under 10 prints “under 10”, and beside a lone one the next-smallest is withheld too, so neither can be worked out from the whole. No rate is printed on fewer than 50 decisions.
  • A lender’s RSSD, the link to the banks hub, is from the 2023 reporter panel, the newest the CFPB has published; a lender that first reported later has none until a newer panel is out.
  • Each year is the CFPB’s fullest release of it: the Three Year for 2018 to 2022, the One Year for 2023 and 2024, and the Snapshot for 2025. A later release can add to a year, with lenders’ resubmissions and late filings, and every page names the release it read.
  • A denial rate does not control for credit history, income, debt or the property, which HMDA does not carry in full, so a difference between groups is not a measure of discrimination, and nothing here says why a rate differs.

Sources

Data retrieved