How to read a bank’s call report

What is a call report?

A call report is the Consolidated Report of Condition and Income that every FDIC-insured depository institution must file each quarter. It is a full balance sheet and income statement, broken into dozens of schedules, submitted through the FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council) Central Data Repository and shared among the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the OCC.

Which form a bank files depends on its size and footprint:

• FFIEC 031 — institutions with foreign offices, and the largest domestic banks. The longest form.
• FFIEC 041 — domestic-only institutions that are too large for the streamlined form.
• FFIEC 051 — a shortened form for eligible smaller domestic institutions, introduced to cut reporting burden on community banks.

Credit unions do not file call reports with the FFIEC. They file the NCUA Form 5300 Call Report with the National Credit Union Administration on a similar quarterly cycle. The concepts below transfer, but the field names do not — see FDIC vs NCUA for how the two systems differ.

How current is call-report data, really?

Expect the newest published figures to describe a quarter that ended one to three months ago. Two lags stack up. First, filing: banks generally have 30 calendar daysafter each quarter end to submit (35 days for institutions with foreign offices), so the March 31 quarter is typically not even filed until around April 30. Second, processing and publication: amended filings, validation, and aggregation mean the FDIC’s own quarterly industry analysis lands roughly two months after the quarter closes.

This matters more than it sounds. A bank’s condition on the day you read about it can differ from the snapshot you are reading. In March 2023, the deposit runs that took down two banks played out in days — far faster than any quarterly filing cycle could capture. Quarterly data is excellent for structural questions (is this bank well capitalized, is it profitable through the cycle) and useless as an early-warning tripwire.

What does REPDTE mean?

REPDTE is the reporting date — the quarter-end the numbers describe, not the date they were published. In the FDIC API it comes back as mm/dd/yyyy. A record with REPDTE: "03/31/2026" is a photograph of the balance sheet at the close of business on March 31, 2026.

Always read REPDTE before you compare two institutions. If one record is from the December quarter and the other from March, you are comparing different moments in a rate cycle. BankSonar surfaces the reporting date on every bank profile for exactly this reason.

Where does the public data live?

The FDIC publishes all of it through the BankFind Suite API at https://api.fdic.gov/banks. It is free, it requires no API key, and it requires no registration. That single fact is the foundation of this site: there is no proprietary data behind the Sonar Score, so anyone can reproduce it.

The endpoints you will actually use:

• /institutions — identity plus the headline financial fields. This is where almost everything on BankSonar comes from.
• /locations — branch addresses for a given certificate.
• /financials — the deeper time series of call-report items.
• /failures — the historical record of failed institutions.

For a point-and-click view of the same data, the FDIC runs BankFind Suite, and the field dictionary lives at api.fdic.gov/banks/docs. Treat that dictionary as authoritative — field names do occasionally change as reporting requirements evolve.

The gotcha that trips up everyone: thousands

FDIC monetary fields are reported in thousands of dollars. Not dollars. Not millions. Thousands.

If a bank’s ASSET field reads 3,395,000, that bank holds $3,395,000,000 — about $3.4 billion. Read it as dollars and you would describe a mid-size regional bank as a corner credit union. Ratio fields (ROA, ROE, RBCT1J) are already percentages and are not scaled, so a value of 1.12 means 1.12%.

Every dollar figure on BankSonar passes through a single formatting helper that multiplies by 1,000 before display, so what you see on a bank page is already converted. When you check our math against the raw API, remember to do that conversion yourself.

Which fields actually matter?

A full call report runs to thousands of line items. For judging financial condition, a small handful carries most of the signal. Here is what each one is and how to read it.

Size and funding

• ASSET — total assets ($thousands). Everything the bank owns: loans, securities, cash, premises. The denominator for most ratios.
• DEP — total deposits ($thousands). Customer money. Compare it to ASSET: a deposit-funded bank (deposits are most of assets) is funded more stably than one leaning on borrowings. Note that the call report’s headline deposit figure does not tell you how much is uninsured — that concentration risk is the variable that mattered most in 2023.
• EQ — total equity capital ($thousands). The owners’ stake, and the first money to absorb losses. EQ / ASSET gives you a rough, unweighted capital cushion.
• LNLSNET — net loans and leases ($thousands). The lending book after the allowance for credit losses. LNLSNET / DEP is the classic loan-to-deposit ratio.

Earnings

• NETINC — net income ($thousands). Bottom-line profit for the period. Watch the sign; a negative quarter is not automatically a crisis, but a run of them erodes capital.
• ROA — return on assets (%). Net income divided by average assets. The industry rule of thumb: above 1% is healthy, 0.5%–1% is acceptable, below zero means the bank lost money in the period.
• ROE — return on equity (%). How hard the bank works its capital. Roughly 10%+ is strong. Read it with the capital ratio, never instead of it: a thinly capitalized bank can post a flattering ROE precisely because its equity base is small.
• EINTEXP — total interest expense ($thousands). What the bank pays for its funding. When this climbs faster than interest income, margin is compressing — often the first visible sign of deposit competition.

Capital and asset quality

• RBCT1J — tier-1 risk-based capital ratio (%). Core capital against risk-weighted assets, so a Treasury-heavy balance sheet is treated differently from a construction-loan book. This is the most informative single number in the file, and it is the highest-weighted input to the Sonar Score.
• RBCRWAJ — total risk-based capital ratio (%). The same idea including tier-2 capital. Regulators apply a higher threshold to it than to tier 1.
• Nonperforming assets. The FDIC exposes nonperforming-asset measures (BankSonar reads NPERFV); conceptually these capture loans 90+ days past due and still accruing, plus nonaccrual loans, plus repossessed real estate. Read them as a percentage of total loans, and watch the trend across quarters rather than any single reading. Rising nonperformers with flat reserves is the combination worth noticing.

What does “well capitalized” mean?

“Well capitalized” is a defined legal category, not marketing. Under the Prompt Corrective Action framework, an insured bank is sorted into one of five capital categories, and the category determines what regulators are required to do. These are the thresholds a bank must meet or exceed on all listed ratios:

A bank must also not be subject to a written capital directive to claim the top category. The consequences escalate downward: undercapitalized banks face restrictions on dividends, growth, and brokered deposits and must submit a capital restoration plan, while a critically undercapitalized bank generally faces receivership within 90 days. That last rung is why the leverage and tier-1 figures are worth checking rather than skimming.

How BankSonar turns these fields into a score

The Sonar Score uses exactly four call-report values, and nothing else. Full disclosure of inputs and weights lives on the methodology page, but here is the arithmetic in one place:

• Capital adequacy — 40% weight. RBCT1J mapped linearly from 6% (score 0) to 14% (score 100).
• Profitability — 30% weight. ROAmapped from −0.5% (score 0) to 1.5% (score 100).
• Return on equity — 15% weight. ROEmapped from −5% (score 0) to 15% (score 100).
• Scale & stability — 15% weight. ASSET converted to dollars and log-scaled, mapped from $100M (score 0) to $100B (score 100).

Worked example, for a hypothetical bank:

• RBCT1J= 12.5 → (12.5 − 6) / (14 − 6) = 0.8125 → 81.3
• ROA = 1.10 → (1.10 + 0.5) / 2.0 = 0.80 → 80.0
• ROE = 11.0 → (11.0 + 5) / 20 = 0.80 → 80.0
• ASSET= 2,000,000 ($thousands) = $2B → log₁₀ = 9.30 → (9.30 − 8) / 3 = 0.434 → 43.4

Composite: (81.3 × 0.40) + (80.0 × 0.30) + (80.0 × 0.15) + (43.4 × 0.15) = 75, which lands in the Stableband (65–79). Notice how much the scale component drags on a perfectly healthy $2B community bank — that is a known, disclosed property of the model, not a hidden judgment. Read what a good bank health score looks like for how to weigh that.

How do I verify BankSonar’s numbers myself?

Take the certificate number, query the FDIC directly, and compare. It takes about two minutes and needs nothing but a browser.

Step 1 — get the CERT. Every bank page on this site is keyed on the FDIC certificate number, and it is right there in the URL: banksonar.com/banks/{CERT}. Names change and merge; certificate numbers are the stable identifier, which is why we key on them. Find your bank in the directory.

Step 2 — hit the endpoint. Paste this into your address bar, replacing {CERT}:

(Remove the line breaks — they are only here for readability.)

Step 3 — read the envelope. The FDIC wraps every record twice. The response looks like {"data":[{"data":{…},"score":…}],"totals":{"count":1}}. Your fields are in the inner data object.

Step 4 — convert and compare. Multiply ASSET, DEP, EQ, and NETINC by 1,000 to get dollars. Leave ROA, ROE, and RBCT1Jalone — they are already percentages. Then line them up against the bank’s BankSonar profile.

Step 5 — check REPDTE. If our page and your query show the same reporting date, the figures should match exactly. If they differ, one of the two is looking at a newer quarter; our data is cached for 24 hours, so a freshly filed quarter can take a day to appear.

Step 6 — run the score. Plug RBCT1J, ROA, ROE, and ASSET into the four formulas above. You should land on the same number we publish. If you do not, we want to hear about it.

What a call report cannot tell you

Being rigorous about the source data also means being honest about its blind spots. A quarterly public filing does not show you:

• Deposit concentration. Whether ten depositors hold half the funding base, and how much of the deposit book sits above the $250,000 insurance limit. This was decisive in 2023.
• Real-time liquidity.A run can empty a bank in a day. In March 2023 a single day saw roughly $42 billion in withdrawal requests at one institution, per the California regulator’s order — no quarterly filing catches that.
• Unrealized losses in held-to-maturity securities in the way a mark-to-market view would, and how they interact with a forced sale.
• Supervisory findings. CAMELS ratings and examination results are confidential and never published.

This is precisely why the honest answer to “is my bank safe?” starts with insurance coverage rather than with a score. Deposits up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category are protected regardless of anything in the call report. Start with our bank safety guide, then use the call report to understand the institution you are handing your money to.