FHA Mortgage Denial Data from the Complete US Federal Record (2018-2025): Lender, Metro, State and Peer-Adjusted Measures

The United States publishes every mortgage application decision under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The raw annual file is roughly two gigabytes and effectively unusable without processing. This deposit is that processing: institution-level, metro-level, state-level and profile-standardized FHA denial statistics computed from the complete CFPB HMDA record with published, reproducible rules. In 2025, 1,217,297 FHA applications reached a credit decision and 21.7% were denied. Across the 100 largest FHA lenders, denial rates ranged from 1.8% to 78.7% - a 44-fold spread inside a single federal programme. Across 320 metropolitan areas, rates ranged from 8.9% to 31.8%. In Cleveland, Ohio, the five highest-volume FHA lenders ranged from 6.3% to 80.1%, a 73.8-point spread inside one metro. "Incomplete application" is cited on a median 1.2% of denials across the 100 largest lenders but 73.5% at one servicer-rooted institution. The deposit also includes a peer-standardized measure. Applications are assigned to 40,459 borrower-profile cells (state, loan-amount band, income band, debt-to-income band, combined loan-to-value band); market-wide cell rates are applied to each institution's own application mix to compute expected denials, and the peer-adjusted ratio is observed divided by expected. Applicant mix explains a 2.9-fold range in expected rates while the observed range remains 44-fold, with a rank correlation of 0.93 between raw and adjusted measures. Definitions: FHA = loan_type 2; decisioned = action_taken 1, 2, 3; denial = action 3; withdrawn and incomplete-closed files are excluded from the universe. Denominator construction is the largest source of divergence among published mortgage denial statistics and is stated explicitly so figures can be reconciled with other publishers rather than merely compared. Limitations: HMDA contains no credit scores, so the standardization controls the profile dimensions the federal record contains rather than the full underwriting information set. Denial rates reflect lawful business decisions including credit policy, overlays and channel structure; nothing here is an allegation of wrongdoing, a rating, or a prediction about any individual application.