Every number on this site comes from one source, and every grade from one formula. This page is the whole formula. 3,205 of 4,910 lenders are graded for 2025.
The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requires nearly every lender that makes home loans to report each application it receives to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: what was applied for, what the lender decided, why it denied, what rate and fees the loan carried, and basic facts about the borrower and property. The CFPB publishes the full register once a year. We use the 2023, 2024, 2025 releases; 2025 is the grading year.
We do not use customer reviews, lender-submitted information, affiliate feeds or advertising relationships. A lender cannot see its grade before you do and cannot change it.
| Applications | Records with action taken 1–5: originated, approved but not accepted, denied, withdrawn by applicant, closed for incompleteness. Loans a lender purchased from another lender (action 6) and preapproval requests (7, 8) are not applications and are excluded from every rate. |
|---|---|
| Decided applications | Actions 1–3: the lender said yes or no. |
| Denial rate | Denied ÷ applications. The headline figure most publications quote. |
| Decision denial rate | Denied ÷ decided applications. This is what the grade uses, because a withdrawn file is the applicant's choice and an incomplete file is a process failure, not a credit decision. |
| Origination rate | Originated ÷ applications. |
| Median rate | Median interest rate on originated loans with a reported rate. Rate spread is the loan's APR minus the average prime offer rate (APOR) for a comparable loan on the week it was locked, so it controls for market rates at the time. |
| Total loan costs | The HMDA "total loan costs" field on originated loans, expressed as a share of the median loan amount. |
Comparing a home-equity specialist with a purchase lender is meaningless: HELOC denial rates run at three times purchase denial rates for structural reasons. Each lender is placed in one band by its 2025 mix and size, and every percentile below is computed inside that band only.
A lender with fewer than 100 decided applications is shown but not graded. Its figures are real; they are just too few to rank fairly.
| Component | Weight | Measure | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approval odds | 45% | Decision denial rate | Lower is better |
| Pricing | 30% | Median rate spread over APOR on originated loans (needs 30+ priced loans) | Lower is better |
| Process | 15% | Share of applications withdrawn or closed for incompleteness | Lower is better |
| Closing costs | 10% | Median total loan costs ÷ median loan amount (where reported) | Lower is better |
Each component is converted to a percentile rank within the peer band (0 = worst in band, 100 = best). The composite is the weighted mean. Where a lender does not report a component (some depository institutions are exempt from HMDA pricing fields), that component is dropped and the remaining weights are rescaled, so an exemption is neither a penalty nor a bonus.
The composite is itself ranked within the band, and the letter comes from that rank: A for the 80th percentile and above, B for 50–79, C for 20–49, D for 5–19, F below the 5th percentile. Roughly one lender in five earns an A and one in twenty an F.
| Grade | Lenders (2025) |
|---|---|
| A | 655 |
| B | 962 |
| C | 961 |
| D | 478 |
| F | 149 |
If a figure on this site does not match a lender's HMDA filing, tell us and we will check it against the CFPB file and correct it. We do not accept requests to change grades on any other basis.
