FinanceRateCalc/fha-denial-reason-fingerprints

FHA Denial Reason Fingerprints — 100 Largest Lenders (2025)

Every lender denies. This dataset shows what they blame — the distribution of cited denial reasons for each of the 100 largest FHA lenders in the complete 2025 CFPB HMDA record.

Why it matters

Reason distributions are far more lender-specific than denial rates themselves:

• "Incomplete application" — median share 1.2% across the 100 lenders, but 73.5% at Carrington Mortgage Services and 72.2% at Lakeview Loan Servicing (both servicer-rooted). See The Incomplete Wall: https://financeratecalc.com/the-incomplete-wall.html
• Collateral — median 8.9%, but a median of 0.1% among the eight builder-owned lenders (DHI, Lennar, NVR, Pulte, Inspire, M/I, Taylor Morrison, HomeAmerican), whose denials run instead on debt-to-income (median 50.5% vs 29.4%). See The Builder's Door: https://financeratecalc.com/the-builders-door.html
• DTI — the market's most common reason, median 29.4% of cited reasons.

Files

• fha_denial_reason_fingerprints_2025.csv — one row per lender, eight reason shares
• reason_fingerprints_2025.json — same data plus method string

Methodology

FHA = loan_type 2. Decisioned = action_taken {1,2,3}; denial = action 3. Reason shares are computed on cited denial reasons of formal denials only; files closed for incompleteness (action 5) and withdrawn files (action 4) are excluded from the universe entirely. Full rules: https://financeratecalc.com/methodology.html

Reason distributions partly reflect applicant, product and channel mix. These are historical observations, not evidence of wrongdoing and not recommendations about any lender.

Citation

Primary data: CFPB HMDA 2025 Snapshot. Derived rates: Yetiş, Z. (2026), FHA Denial Reason Fingerprints, FinanceRateCalc. https://financeratecalc.com — companion working paper: SSRN abstract 7156938.

CC BY 4.0 · Not a lender · No ads · A denial is a data point, not a verdict on the applicant.