Where the numbers come from

Every rate and cost figure on this site is computed from one public source: the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Modified Loan/Application Register, published by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council through the CFPB at ffiec.cfpb.gov. This page documents exactly what was done to it, so anything here can be reproduced or checked.

The source

HMDA requires most mortgage lenders to report every application and originated loan each year, including the interest rate, total loan costs, origination charges, discount points, loan amount, county, and loan purpose. The public release is the Modified LAR: modified because certain fields are rounded or withheld to protect privacy (age, precise income, and similar). Lenders are identified by their Legal Entity Identifier (LEI); this site maps LEIs to lender names using the FFIEC panel data.

Filters applied

The medians here are meant to describe an ordinary owner-occupant getting an ordinary mortgage, so the data is filtered to loans that were:

originated (applications that closed, not denials or withdrawals),
first-lien,
secured by the borrower's owner-occupied principal residence,
not for a business or commercial purpose, and
not reverse mortgages.

Loans are grouped by year, county, loan purpose (home purchase or refinance, with cash-out and no-cash-out refinances combined), and, on the lender tables, by lender.

The 5-loan floor

A group (a county, or a lender within a county) appears on this site only if it contains at least 5 loans. A median of two or three loans is noise, and tiny groups raise re-identification concerns even in modified data. Counties and lenders below the floor are simply absent, not zero.

What median means here

The median is the middle loan: half the qualifying loans in the group had a lower figure, half had a higher one. Medians are used instead of averages because loan costs have long tails (a few very large or unusual loans would drag an average around). Rate pages also show the 25th and 75th percentiles, the band containing the middle half of loans, which is a fairer picture of the spread than any single number.

What these numbers are not

Not quotes. They describe loans that already closed, under those borrowers' credit profiles, loan sizes, points paid, and lock dates. Your offer will differ.
Not risk-adjusted. HMDA's public file contains no credit scores, so differences between lenders partly reflect different customer mixes, not just different pricing.
Not complete. Some small lenders are exempt from reporting some fields, and the current year's data arrives on a lag. Where a year is missing on a page, it has not been loaded or published yet.

Years covered

2024 and 2025 filing-year data, loaded as published. Reproducing any figure requires only the public Modified LAR for the year, the filters above, and a median; corrections are welcome at dan@mnbuddynetwork.com.

The rules content on this site cites its own sources separately; see the Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure pages.