Method & limits

Who publishes this

Bankfailures.fyi is an independent, non-commercial project. It sells nothing, takes no advertising, accepts no payment from any financial institution, and has no relationship with the FDIC or any bank named on it. It is not a rating agency and its output is not a rating.

It is not financial advice. It is a published calculation from public filings, of the kind any reader could repeat — and this page exists so that they can.

The formula, field by field

The Texas Ratio compares the assets a bank is having trouble collecting on against the capital it holds to absorb losses. Bank analysts developed it during the 1980s Texas banking crisis. We calculate it as:

(NALNLS + P9LNLS + ORE)
÷ ((EQ − INTAN) + LNATRES)

Every term is a field on the FDIC's public BankFind financials endpoint, taken from the bank's most recent quarterly Call Report. All are reported in thousands of dollars and multiplied by 1,000 for display.

On preferred stock. Because EQ includes preferred, the cushion is slightly overstated for any bank that has some, and its ratio reads a little low. Among the 500 largest banks only 24 hold preferred at charter level — it is nearly always issued at the holding company instead — and excluding it does not move any of them into a different band. The effect is real but small, and we would rather state it than imply a precision we do not have.

If any component is missing from a bank's filing, no ratio is calculated and the bank shows as N/A. It is never treated as zero — a missing numerator would otherwise render an unknown bank as perfectly healthy. In practice this is almost always a US branch of a foreign bank, which files a different schedule with no equity line of its own.

There is no ratio either when the denominator is zero or negative — when tangible equity plus reserves has been wiped out. Arithmetically that looks the same as missing data, and it means the opposite, so we show it differently: as No cushion, not N/A. Citizens Bank of Sac City looked exactly like this on its final filing before the FDIC closed it in 2023.

The still-accruing check

This is the one place where we deliberately depart from simply printing the standard number, so it is worth explaining in full.

The middle term of the numerator, P9LNLS, counts loans that are more than 90 days late but on which the bank is still recognising interest income. A bank only does that when it still expects to be repaid. For large mortgage servicers the reason is usually a government guarantee: FHA and VA loans repurchased out of Ginnie Mae pools stay on the balance sheet, delinquent, accruing, and carrying almost no risk of loss because the guarantee stands behind them.

Counted as distress, those balances can overwhelm the ratio. MidFirst Bank's Q1 2026 filing reported $6.32bn of them — 96.6% of its numerator, and 99.1% of that 1–4 family residential — against a loan loss allowance of 0.67% of loans and non-accrual loans of 0.64%. The standard ratio reads 162.4%. Drop the accruing term and the same bank reads 5.6%. The bank is not in distress; the metric is being fed paper it was never designed for.

The FDIC's financials endpoint publishes no government-guaranteed balance, so the guarantee cannot be netted out directly. What we do instead:

• Calculate a core ratio alongside the standard one, using only non-accrual loans and repossessed property — the part of the numerator a guarantee cannot be hiding in.
• Where the accruing term is at least 40% of the numerator and removing it would put the bank in a different band, we mark the bank Flagged and publish no band at all.
• Both figures stay on screen. The headline number remains the standard Texas Ratio, so it still reconciles with anything else you compare it against.

Both conditions matter. Flagging on the 40% share alone would strip the label from 41 of the largest 500 banks, most of them small ratios sitting comfortably in the same band either way — that buys no honesty and loses information. Requiring that the band actually change narrows it to the handful of banks where the answer genuinely depends on the questionable term. At the most recent regeneration that was 5 banks out of 500.

This is a heuristic, not a measurement. It identifies a pattern strongly associated with guaranteed servicing paper; it does not prove a guarantee exists. The authoritative figure is Call Report Schedule RC-N, Memorandum item 1 — past due loans wholly or partially guaranteed by the U.S. Government — which is not exposed by this API. A bank may also be flagged for reasons that have nothing to do with mortgages.

Where the risk bands come from

Only the 100% line has any standing. Above it, problem assets exceed the cushion held against them, and that is the threshold the literature actually cites. It is a reason to look more closely. It is not a prediction of failure, and plenty of banks have carried a ratio above it and recovered.

Everything else — Strong below 20%, Good 20–40%, OK 40–70%, Poor 70–100% — is our own invention, chosen to make the number readable at a glance. No regulator or standards body recognises them. A different site could draw the lines elsewhere and be equally justified.

They also flatten a real distinction the ratio cannot make: a 15% reading means different things for a credit card bank and a residential mortgage lender, and this site does not adjust for business model or peer group. Read the band as a rough reading aid and the number as the fact.

What this ratio cannot tell you

The Texas Ratio is a backward-looking measure of credit quality. It answers one question: has this bank's loan book gone bad faster than its capital can absorb? Where a bank fails for some other reason, it has nothing to say.

Five FDIC-insured banks failed in 2023. Computed the way this site computes it, from each one's final Call Report before failing:

Four of the five would have shown a reassuring green. First Republic's figure is from the quarter that ended five weeks before it was seized. Silicon Valley Bank, Signature and First Republic failed in runs driven by uninsured deposits and interest-rate losses, none of which this ratio measures. Heartland Tri-State failed through fraud, which no ratio measures.

The fifth is the exception that shows what the ratio is for. Citizens Bank of Sac City failed from concentrated losses in its loan book — an ordinary credit failure — and the Texas Ratio saw it coming a long way off: 14.0% in Q1 2022, 48.7% by Q2, then 141.8% in Q3 2022 and above 140% every quarter after. That was thirteen months before it was closed. By its final filing the bank's tangible equity and reserves were already negative, so the ratio is undefined and this site would show N/A — which is why an N/A here is never a clean bill of health.

That is the honest summary: this measure catches deteriorating loan books, sometimes early. It does not catch runs, rate risk or fraud, and in 2023 those caused four failures out of five.

Things this ratio does not measure, all of which mattered more in 2023:

• Uninsured deposit share — over 90% at SVB, and the reason the run moved so fast.
• Unrealised securities losses — the gap between what a bond portfolio is worth on the books and what it would fetch today.
• Regulatory capital ratios — leverage and CET1, which have published thresholds set by regulators rather than by us.
• Funding mix and deposit flows — reliance on brokered or wholesale money, and whether deposits are leaving.
• Concentration — in commercial real estate, or in a single volatile industry.

If you hold balances above the insured limits, those are the figures to go and read. This one ratio is not a substitute for them, and no single ratio predicts a bank failure.

Charters, not holding companies

Call Reports are filed by each banking charter, not by the group that owns it. Most people think in brands; the FDIC thinks in charters, and the two do not line up.

Large groups often run several charters of very different sizes. Wells Fargo & Company, for instance, has Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. at roughly $1.85 trillion in assets alongside much smaller separately chartered banks. Searching “Wells Fargo” returns all of them, and they do not carry the same figures.

We list banks under their legal charter name, so the brand on your branch or debit card may not match. If you are unsure which charter holds your account, your deposit agreement or statement will name it, and the FDIC certificate number is the unambiguous identifier. Credit unions are insured by the NCUA rather than the FDIC and do not appear on this site at all.

Data, vintage and reproducing it

Every figure comes from the FDIC's public BankFind API at api.fdic.gov/banks, sourced from quarterly Call Reports. Nothing here is real-time or proprietary.

There is an unavoidable lag. Banks file roughly 30 days after a quarter closes and the FDIC publishes some weeks after that, so the most current figure available is generally between two and five months old. Every result shows the quarter it came from. Banking conditions can change faster than that, and in 2023 they did.

Two paths, one calculation. A single bank lookup queries the FDIC live. The 500-bank list is a snapshot file regenerated each filing cycle by scripts/fetch_watchlist_data.py, which uses the same arithmetic. The list header states the reporting period; the snapshot also carries each bank's own filing date, and any bank whose quarter differs from the rest is marked on its row rather than being quietly averaged in. If the snapshot falls a full cycle behind, the page says so itself.

You can check any of this. Take a certificate number, request the fields listed above from the FDIC endpoint, and do the division. If your answer differs from ours, we would like to know — see below.

Corrections

This site publishes calculated figures about named, regulated institutions. That obliges us to be reachable and to fix what is wrong.

If you are a bank, a journalist or a reader who believes a figure here is wrong — whether the arithmetic, the underlying filing, or the framing around it — write to [contact address] with the bank's name or certificate number and what you believe the correct figure to be.

Where a number is wrong we will correct it and note what changed. Where a number is right but misleading, we would still like to hear about it — the still-accruing check described above exists precisely because a technically correct figure was telling readers something untrue.

Where the FDIC's own published data is the source of an error, we will say so and link the filing rather than quietly adjust it.