Microproduct data guideintermediate

HMDA Loan Application Register

Home Mortgage Disclosure Act loan-application records for building local mortgage-market and fair-lending research tools.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Intermediate — some data preparation helps
Size
Large · 0.1–20 GB
Formats
CSV, ZIP
Access
Download or API
API key
Not required
Provider
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Updates
Annual
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

HMDA LAR records loan applications, originations, and denials. Start with one year and one state through the Data Browser. Applicant race and ethnicity fields have disclosure rules, and a LAR row is not a credit decision you can reverse-engineer.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the HMDA Data Publication page and choose the Data Browser.
  2. 2.Filter to one year and one state with a small set of fields.
  3. 3.Keep action taken, loan amount, and census tract.
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3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

from io import StringIO
import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://ffiec.cfpb.gov/v2/data-browser-api/view/csv",
    params={
        "years": "2023",
        "states": "VT",
        "actions_taken": "1",
    },
    timeout=120,
)
response.raise_for_status()
loans = pd.read_csv(StringIO(response.text), nrows=200)
print(loans.head())
4

Test a useful signal

Profile Vermont originations

Test whether a one-state LAR extract can power a bounded mortgage-volume sketch.

  1. 01Keep action taken, loan amount, and census tract from the first rows.
  2. 02Summarize origination counts and median loan amount.
  3. 03Explain that HMDA is an application register with suppressed fields and is not a credit-scoring file.

Dataset details

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: annual HMDA filings from 2007-present with schema changes.

Theme

Markets & Economics

Domains

HousingConsumer FinanceFinancial Regulation

Data types

TabularLoan Records

Tasks

Mortgage Market AnalysisFair Lending ResearchGeographic Comparison

Geography

United States

Formats

CSVZIP

Provider

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance