At CLTV 84%, Rocket Mortgage denies about 30% of FHA applicants with your profile. At CLTV 86%, that number jumps to 84%. Same home. Two percent more borrowed. Completely different outcome.
Slide to your CLTV. See what happens at the wall.
These are real numbers from CFPB HMDA loan-level data, 2023 and 2025. The cliff didn't move.
| Lender | 80–84% denial | 85–89% denial | Jump | 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mr. Cooper | 4.8% | 5.8% | +1.0pp | +2.3pp | +1.7pp |
| Guild | 10.8% | 28.5% | +17.7pp | +21.4pp | +12.0pp |
| CrossCountry | 15.1% | 87.0% | +71.9pp | +71.5pp | +47.5pp |
| Freedom | 23.3% | 67.7% | +44.3pp | +64.5pp | +28.2pp |
| PennyMac | 20.5% | 54.0% | +33.5pp | +40.2pp | +24.7pp |
| Rocket | 29.5% | 84.9% | +55.4pp | +46.0pp | +54.9pp |
Mr. Cooper is the exception, not the rule. Its CLTV-85 jump is +1.7pp — virtually nothing. Every other lender shows a wall of 12–72 points. The wall is not an FHA rule. It's a lender overlay — an internal policy. And it's different at every institution. This is what "decision surface geometry" means in practice.
🔍 Also explore: All FRC Tools · Lender Comparison · FHA by State · Lender Stress Index
Prices and rates are widely reported. Whether a lender says yes is not. In the complete 2025 federal record, denial rates across the 100 largest FHA lenders ran from 1.8% to 78.7% — same programme, same year.
And it is not simply who applies where: standardizing on state, loan amount, income, debt-to-income and loan-to-value, applicant mix explains only a 2.7× range in expected outcomes.
CFPB HMDA 2025, computed by FinanceRateCalc. Covers the highest-volume lenders published per market, not all lenders. Historical observations, not predictions. CC BY 4.0, not independently reproduced.