Frequently Asked Questions

A bank fails when it can no longer meet its obligations to customers and creditors. The FDIC then takes it over, and almost always arranges for another bank to take on the deposits.

For an insured depositor this is usually undramatic. Your accounts move to the new bank, your money stays available, and the first you hear of it is often a letter with your next statement. The FDIC's own words: “No depositor has ever lost a penny of insured deposits since the FDIC was created in 1933.”

Money above the insured limit is different. It is not guaranteed, and recovering it depends on what the failed bank's assets are eventually worth. That is why the amount you hold above $250,000 matters far more than any figure on this site.

FDIC insurance covers your deposits up to $250,000 per depositor, per bank, per ownership category. That last phrase is where most people underestimate their own cover, because the $250,000 is not one limit on everything you hold at a bank — it applies separately to each category.

Single accounts, joint accounts, certain retirement accounts and trust accounts are each their own category. On a joint account, the FDIC insures each co-owner up to $250,000 for their share — so a couple's $500,000 joint account is covered in full.

The rules have edge cases, so do not take a worked example as a ruling on your own accounts. The FDIC publishes a calculator that gives you the answer for your actual balances:

The Texas Ratio compares a bank's non-performing assets — loans it has stopped expecting payment on, loans more than 90 days past due, and property repossessed from borrowers — against the capital it holds to absorb those losses. Bank analysts developed it during the 1980s Texas banking crisis, which is where the name comes from.

We calculate it as:

(non-accrual loans + 90-day past due + other real estate owned)
÷ (tangible equity capital + loan loss reserves)

Above 100% means problem assets exceed that cushion. That is the one threshold in common use, and it is a reason to look more closely — not a prediction that a bank will fail. Plenty of banks have carried a high ratio and recovered.

The intermediate bands we show (Strong, Good, OK, Poor) are our own cutoffs chosen to make the number readable at a glance. They are not an industry standard. The ratio is also a single credit-quality measure: it says nothing about liquidity, interest rate risk, or deposit concentration — the factors behind the 2023 failures. Silicon Valley Bank, Signature and First Republic all scored under 3% on their final filings before they failed. That is why every result also carries five further measures the ratio cannot see.

One term needs care. The 90-day past due figure counts loans that are late but still accruing interest, which for large mortgage servicers is mostly government-guaranteed FHA and VA paper carrying almost no loss content. Where that term dominates and changes the answer, we publish the ratio but withhold the risk band and mark the bank Flagged.

Tangible equity above means total equity capital less goodwill and other intangibles. It excludes non-controlling interests but still includes any preferred stock, so it is tangible total equity rather than tangible common equity.

A "bank run" occurs when many customers withdraw their funds simultaneously due to concerns about the bank's stability.

This can happen when a bank has too many non-performing loans, insufficient cash reserves, mismatched interest rates on assets and liabilities, or during broader market uncertainty.

The digital banking era has accelerated these events, allowing withdrawals to happen much faster than in the past — as demonstrated during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023.

Before the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic in 2023, several warning signs were evident: very high concentrations of uninsured deposits, large unrealized losses in investment portfolios caused by rapidly rising interest rates, customer bases concentrated in a single volatile industry, and inadequate interest rate risk management.

On its final Call Report, for the quarter ending 31 December 2022, SVB reported $151.6bn of uninsured deposits against $161.5bn of domestic deposits — roughly 94% uninsured. That is the figure that made the run move as fast as it did.

None of those warning signs appear in the Texas Ratio, which is why all three banks scored under 3% on those same filings. This site would have rated every one of them “Strong”.

Broadly: deposits leaving the system, customers moving into higher-yielding accounts, thinner cash reserves, and greater reliance on wholesale funding — borrowed money, which is quicker to disappear than a retail deposit.

The specific figures below are from the FDIC's 2024 Risk Review and describe conditions in 2023. We quote them with their date rather than as current conditions, because we do not recompute them: total U.S. deposits fell by roughly $380 billion (2.1%), with uninsured deposits declining while insured deposits grew, and community banks' liquid assets fell to their lowest share of total assets since 2008, at about 17%.

For current conditions, read the latest edition at the source rather than relying on this page. The FDIC publishes a new Risk Review and a Quarterly Banking Profile each year, and neither is something this site tracks.

Every figure comes from FDIC Call Reports, which banks file quarterly. Nothing here is real-time — the most recent data available is always the last completed reporting quarter, and the FDIC publishes it some weeks after that quarter ends.

Banks file about 30 days after a quarter closes and the FDIC publishes some weeks after that, so the newest figure available is generally between two and five months old. Because that lag matters, we show the reporting period alongside every result — on a bank's page as “Data as of Q1 2026”, and at the top of the watchlist — and state the lag itself rather than letting the figure pass as current.

Almost every FDIC-insured bank files on schedule. If one is two or more quarters behind, we say so on its result, because that is unusual in itself. The 500-bank list is a snapshot regenerated each cycle; if it falls a full cycle behind, the page flags itself as out of date.

The Texas Ratio measures credit quality and nothing else. The 2023 failures were not credit failures, so every bank result also carries the five figures that were moving, from the same quarterly filing:

• Uninsured deposit share — how much of a bank's US deposits sit above the $250,000 insurance limit. Money above the limit is the money that leaves first. Silicon Valley Bank's final filing measured 93.8%.
• Unrealized securities losses — what a bond portfolio would fetch today against what it is carried at. The held-to-maturity part of that gap appears nowhere on the balance sheet: SVB's was $15.16bn against $15.17bn of tangible equity.
• Regulatory capital ratios — leverage, CET1 and the two risk-based ratios, read against the Prompt Corrective Action thresholds at 12 CFR 324.403.
• Funding mix and deposit flows — reliance on brokered and borrowed money, and whether deposits are leaving. First Republic's last filing showed deposits down 40.8% in one quarter.
• Concentration — commercial real estate against total risk-based capital, read against the 2006 interagency guidance, plus the loan book by category.

None of them is scored. Where a regulator has published a threshold, the page names it and names who set it. Where none exists — uninsured share, unrealized losses, deposit flows — it shows the figure and stops. The Texas Ratio's own intermediate bands are our invention and the site says so; five more sets of invented bands would have been worth less than nothing.

Six measures do not predict a failure any better than one does. All three banks that failed in March 2023 were well capitalized on their final filings. These figures are context, not a forecast.

Yes. Bankfailures.fyi is free, non-commercial, sells nothing and takes no advertising or payment from any financial institution.

It is a published calculation from public FDIC filings — not financial advice, and not a credit rating. The method page sets out the exact formula and what it cannot tell you, so you can check any figure yourself.