How to check if your bank or credit union is safe

For most people the most important safety question has a simple answer. If your money is in deposit accounts at an FDIC-insured bank or NCUA-insured credit union, and your balances are within the insurance limits, your deposits are protected even if the institution fails. Confirm the insurance first, then check your balances against the limits with our deposit coverage calculator or the guides on FDIC insurance and NCUA share insurance.

Financial health matters more if you hold uninsured balances, run a business with large operating accounts, or simply want to bank with a sound institution and avoid the disruption a failure can cause.

Every insured bank files a quarterly Consolidated Report of Condition and Income, known as the call report, with its federal regulator. Credit unions file the quarterly NCUA 5300 call report. These filings contain the balance sheet, income statement, capital calculations and loan-performance detail, and the regulators publish them. They are the raw material for nearly every public bank-health measure, including TellerScore. Our guide on how to read a call report explains where to find them.

1. Capital. Equity is the cushion that absorbs losses before depositors are affected. For banks, the Tier 1 leverage ratio compares core capital to average total assets; regulators generally treat 5% or more as "well capitalized" under prompt corrective action rules. For credit unions, the net worth ratio plays the same role, with 7% as the well-capitalized threshold. Higher is safer, all else equal.
2. Problem loans. Noncurrent loans (90 or more days past due, or no longer accruing interest) as a share of total loans. Rising problem loans are often the first visible sign of trouble.
3. Earnings. Return on assets (ROA) shows whether the institution is profitable. Profits rebuild capital; sustained losses erode it.
4. Liquidity and funding. The loans-to-deposits ratio shows how much of its deposit base an institution has lent out. Very high values leave less room to meet withdrawals without selling assets or borrowing.
5. Uninsured deposits. A high share of deposits above the insurance limit can leave quickly in a panic, as the 2023 failures showed. See uninsured deposits explained.

Analysts also look at the Texas ratio, which compares troubled assets to the capital and reserves available to absorb them.

Regulators rate every bank and credit union on a confidential scale. For banks it is called CAMELS — Capital, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity and Sensitivity to market risk — scored from 1 (strongest) to 5. Credit unions have a comparable system. These ratings, the examination reports behind them, and any informal supervisory actions are confidential supervisory information and are not published. Formal enforcement actions are published by the regulators, but often with a lag.

That means public tools, including ours, see only part of the picture. Management quality, interest-rate risk, the true market value of securities, concentrations in particular borrowers or industries, and deposit flows during a single week are poorly captured by quarterly data.

Bank failures are rare, and the fastest ones move faster than the data. Call report data are published weeks after each quarter ends, so a ratio you read today may describe the balance sheet two to five months ago. In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank's depositors withdrew about $42 billion in a single day, according to the Federal Reserve's review — a speed no quarterly filing could capture. Other failures have involved fraud that the published numbers did not reflect.

For these reasons, a strong score is not a guarantee and a weak one is not a forecast. Treat any score as a summary of past reported figures and a prompt for further questions, and rely on deposit insurance as your primary protection.

Each bank and credit union page shows the figures the institution reports publicly to its regulator, how they compare with institutions of a similar size, and how they have moved over recent periods, together with the TellerScore, our own summary of those figures. The TellerScore is not issued or endorsed by any government agency.

• Look at the trend, not just the latest quarter. A falling capital ratio or rising problem loans over several quarters is more informative than a single value.
• Read the peer percentile. Large banks run with lower leverage ratios by design; comparing them only with small community banks can mislead.
• Check the data date on every page so you know which quarter you are reading.