Banking and Finance Law Daily Wrap Up, MORTGAGES—NCRC urges CFPB to maintain HMDA mortgage data collection, (Apr 7, 2026)

By A. Bryan Gerepka

Weakening HMDA requirements would disproportionately harm the very communities the statute was designed to protect.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) urged the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to maintain the current level of data collection required by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Regulation C, as reduced HMDA reporting would significantly impair fair lending enforcement.

The group raised these concerns in a March 26, 2026, comment letter, during the CFPB’s comment period on the renewed HMDA authorization. On Feb. 24, 2026, the agency announced that it was providing an additional 30-day comment period, after requesting comments for 60 days, beginning Dec. 10, 2025 (see Banking and Finance Law Daily, Feb. 27, 2026).

Lending disparities. HMDA data enables regulators, researchers, community organizations, and the public to identify disparities in lending outcomes across racial, ethnic, and income groups. Without this data, discriminatory lending patterns would be significantly more difficult to detect and address, the group stated.

“HMDA is one of the most important tools we have for understanding whether lenders are serving communities fairly,” wrote Jason Richardson, NCRC’s senior director of research. “Weakening HMDA would do little for lenders but a lot to hide discrimination.”

Burdensome compliance costs. At issue is the agency’s assertion that HMDA data collection increases lenders' compliance costs. In the letter, the NCRC, along with 53 state and local NCRC member organizations, outlined a series of points to refute the agency’s view.

1. Congress has repeatedly affirmed HMDA data collection. Beginning in 1975 and through 2010, Congress determined that more data was needed to protect borrowers. Moreover, Congress also explicitly protected core data fields, including race, ethnicity, sex, age, and income, from exemption, preserving the data necessary for fair lending analysis. “Every time Congress has revisited HMDA, it has chosen to maintain or expand the data collection, never to eliminate it,” the group stressed.

2. The Bureau’s burden estimates are confirmed by industry’s own data. The group refuted arguments about high costs, noting that CFPB and industry leaders previously agreed that compliance costs are modest. The group cited a CFPB March 2023 Report on the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Rule Voluntary Review, which found “modest” per-application ongoing compliance costs across all institution tiers: $0.47 for high-complexity institutions, $11 for moderate-complexity institutions, and $42 for low-complexity (small) institutions, all in 2018 dollars. These estimates were also in line with industry costs reported in the 2020 HMDA Final Rule. In addition, “the Bureau found no evidence that HMDA reporting requirements caused lenders to exit the mortgage market,” the group wrote.

3. Changing the threshold reporting requirements would substantially reduce the ability of regulators to implement existing laws. The industry has asserted that increasing the loan threshold that triggers HMDA compliance will help lower compliance costs, the group wrote. However, even minor increases could compromise the entire HMDA data set. For example, the group noted that a 100-loan threshold decreases the number of reporting institutions by 30 percent, while at 200 loans, data from almost half of all lenders would be missing. “This doesn’t just hamper the industry and the public from understanding the housing market, it ties the hands of regulators charged with avoiding another housing crash like that which precipitated the Great Recession,” the group warned.

4. The CFPB and the compliance industry have built an advanced ecosystem that streamlines HMDA reporting. The CFPB’s estimated burden of 1,510,960 total annual hours should also be evaluated against the current compliance technology. Actual bankers and financial institution staff confirm that HMDA compliance has become streamlined in practice, as both the CFPB and the compliance industry have built an advanced ecosystem that automates data uploading, validation, and verification processes, reducing what was once a labor-intensive manual exercise.

5. Most HMDA data is already captured in the normal course of mortgage origination. The Bureau’s burden estimate implicitly treats HMDA data collection as a stand-alone compliance exercise, separate from the lender’s core business operations, and fails to account for the costs lenders would incur to change current systems. Most HMDA-reportable data points are gathered during the standard mortgage origination process because they are essential to underwriting, pricing, and secondary market delivery.

6. Close the purchased loan data stripping loophole to reduce burden and improve data quality. Current CFPB guidance allows lenders that purchase loans to remove demographic data before submitting them to HMDA, the group noted. The originating lender collected this data as part of the application process. It exists in the loan file, the group stressed. If the Bureau’s goal is to reduce burden, “one obvious step is to close this loophole so that purchasing lenders no longer need to expend effort deleting data that was already collected.” This would simultaneously reduce compliance burden and improve data quality, a rare policy change that advances both goals at once, the group added.

7. Certain HMDA fields are essential for fair lending analysis and must be retained. The group stressed that data, such as loan types, lending pricing and patterns, borrower demographics, property locations, and lender identifiers, form the basis for regulators, researchers, industry participants, and community organizations to analyze lending patterns, monitor fair lending compliance, and assess access to credit in local housing markets.

Companies: National Community Reinvestment Coalition

RegulatoryActivity: BankingOperations CFPB FinancialStability Loans Mortgages