Credit-union layer methodology

What the 5300 Call Report is

Every federally insured US credit union must file NCUA Form 5300, the Call Report, each quarter: a standardized statement of financial condition covering assets, shares and deposits, loans, membership, capital and hundreds of other accounts. The NCUA publishes the filings as bulk quarterly data files on ncua.gov. The FinObservatory panel is built from those bulk files: one row per credit union per cycle, keyed by the NCUA charter number (cu_number) and the cycle date, 856,188 rows covering 13,539 distinct charters across 129 quarterly cycles, 1994Q1 through 2026Q1.

The panel carries five financial fields plus identity: total assets (account ACCT_010), total shares and deposits (ACCT_018), total loans outstanding, dollar amount (ACCT_025B; the adjacent 025A is the loan count and is not used), members (ACCT_083), and net worth (ACCT_997). Account codes were resolved against each cycle’s own account-description file rather than assumed constant, because the schema shifts across cycles.

Units: whole dollars

All dollar fields are whole US dollars as filed. This differs from FDIC bank data elsewhere on this site, which is reported in thousands. When a table here says Navy Federal holds $180,813,031,049 at the December 2024 cycle, that is the literal account value, dollar for dollar. No scaling is applied anywhere in this layer.

Annual series use December cycles only

Every annual series on these pages, the industry consolidation charts, the year-end totals table, and the per-state trends, is built from December cycles only. The reason is a structural feature of the early data, recorded in the FinObservatory data-provenance register for the raw NCUA archive:

“1994-2002 March and September cycles are partial-filer collections (subset of credit unions filed quarterly), structurally thinner than June and December; account schemas shift across cycles.”

The panel itself shows how severe this is: the 17 partial-filer cycles (March and September, 1994 through 2002Q1) contain between 1,144 and 2,048 filers each, while the June and December cycles of the same era contain between 9,934 and 12,363. A naive quarterly series would therefore show most of the industry vanishing every March and September before 2002, which is a collection artifact, not consolidation. Full quarterly filing begins with the September 2002 cycle. December cycles are full collections in every year of the panel, so they are the annual convention; the one latest-quarter exception is clearly labeled (the index hero cards and the largest-institutions tables use the most recent cycle, whichever quarter it is).

Net worth exists only from 2000Q4

The net-worth account (ACCT_997) first appears in the 2000Q4 cycle (Dec 2000); before that it is NULL in every row. This is not missing data in the usual sense: the standardized net-worth measure entered the 5300 alongside the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) regime that the Credit Union Membership Access Act of 1998 mandated, with statutory net-worth categories taking effect in 2000. Pre-2000Q4 capital positions exist in other accounts of the raw filings but are not carried in this panel, so no page here shows a net-worth figure before Dec 2000.

Coverage and small print

All filers, not only federally insured ones. The panel keeps every institution in the bulk files, including a small number of non-federally insured filers; the parquet this site reads does not carry the insurance-type flag (CU_TYPE). At the December 2024 cycle the panel sums to 4,550 filers with $2,330,398,305,260 in assets; the NCUA’s published year-end 2024 figures for federally insured credit unions only are 4,455 institutions and $2.31 trillion (NCUA quarterly data summary, announced March 11, 2025). The gap is the non-federally-insured filers. Totals on these pages are the all-filer sums.

Home-state attribution.Each charter carries the home state recorded in the NCUA’s credit-union master file (FOICU), so a credit union operating in many states counts entirely in its home state. The panel contains 57 distinct state codes: the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories, plus a few one-off codes that appear in a single early cycle and are carried exactly as recorded. 9 of 856,188 rows lack a name and state because the filer is absent from that cycle’s master file; they are included in industry totals and excluded from state pages.

Nominal dollars. Nothing on these pages is inflation-adjusted. The 1994-to-2026 asset expansion is a nominal comparison and overstates real growth.

Validation anchors

Two anchors tie the panel to official NCUA publications. First, Navy Federal Credit Union (charter 5536): the panel’s December 2024 total assets, $180,813,031,049, match the official 5300 report for that cycle retrieved from the NCUA’s Research a Credit Union service, exactly, to the dollar. Second, the industry aggregate: the panel’s December 2024 all-filer total of $2,330,398,305,260 reconciles with the NCUA’s published $2.31 trillion for the 4,455 federally insured credit unions once the non-federally-insured filers are set aside, as described above. The panel has zero duplicate (charter, cycle) keys.

Source

NCUA, Credit Union and Corporate Call Report Data, quarterly bulk files, available at ncua.gov. As a work of the US federal government the data is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). The panel was assembled by FinObservatory from the 129 quarterly archives; errors of assembly are ours, not the NCUA’s.

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