The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), enacted in 1975, requires most mortgage lenders to publicly report data about every loan application they receive. The Modified Loan Application Register (Modified LAR) is published annually by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and contains tens of millions of rows — one per loan application. It is the most comprehensive public record of U.S. mortgage lending activity.
Our rankings include only loans that meet all of the following criteria:
Medians are more robust than averages for fee data. A small number of very high-cost loans (jumbo mortgages, complex transactions) can pull the average far above the typical borrower's experience. The median represents the midpoint — half of borrowers paid more, half paid less — and is less influenced by outliers.
To prevent small-sample noise, lenders must meet minimum origination thresholds to appear in each ranking tier:
| Level | Min. volume |
|---|---|
| National lender rankings | 500 originations |
| State lender rankings | 50 originations |
| County lender rankings | 10 originations |
| County included in output | 100 originations (total) |
| Lender profile published | 100 originations (total) |
The total_loan_costsfield in HMDA includes all lender-side origination charges, discount points, and third-party service fees (appraisal, title, settlement) as reported on the Loan Estimate. It does not include prepaid items (homeowner's insurance, property tax escrow) or transfer taxes. This is the closest HMDA field to “Section A + B” on your Closing Disclosure.
HMDA records identify lenders by a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) — a standardized 20-character code. We resolve LEIs to human-readable names in order:
Corporate suffixes (LLC, Inc., N.A., FSB, etc.) are stripped when generating URL slugs. The full legal name is retained in the data.