This tool does not predict approvals and never recommends a lender. It maps your question onto the complete 2025 federal HMDA record (1,187,606 FHA decisions), shows what that public evidence supports — with receipts — and tells you honestly when your question needs a licensed professional instead. Nothing you click is stored; no personal information is asked, ever.
About 38% of the explainable variation in 2025 FHA denial outcomes attaches to lender identity rather than the applicant profile (859,090 decisions; McFadden pseudo-R² 0.171 → 0.276). Raw rates across the 100 largest lenders span 1.8% to 78.7% under the same federal program.
full analysis · receipt · DOI
Often enormously. The widest measured 2025 gap is Cleveland, OH: 6.4% vs 80.1% among high-volume lenders — a 73.7-point spread inside one metro. We publish this gap for 184 metros, each with a machine-readable receipt.
all 184 metros · Cleveland receipt
It barely moves. Across 2018–2025, 80.8% of panel variance sits between lenders; the year-to-year rank correlation is 0.918, and the softest door was the same institution in 7 of 8 years. We've even pre-registered ten predictions about the 2026 data.
Persistent Doors, DOI · dataset
No honest answer exists in this data. The federal record contains no credit scores, no full underwriting file, and aggregate rates are not individual probabilities — anyone who converts them into “your odds” is guessing with confidence.
What to do instead — questions that get real answers from a licensed lender: “What are your FHA overlays on credit score and DTI, beyond FHA minimums?” · “Do you manually underwrite refer/eligible files?” · “Can I see your overlay sheet in writing?”
No lender pays us and none ever will — so we don't rank “best” doors and we don't route applicants. What the evidence does support: denial rates differ persistently and enormously, so shopping more than one door is the single most data-supported move after a denial.
Compare observed rates yourself: top-100 table · your metro
HMDA reports income amounts, not income types — the public record cannot distinguish W-2 from 1099 from SSDI. Any lender-by-income-type approval claim you see online is not computable from this data.
Real-answer questions for a licensed lender: “How many months of 1099 history do you require for FHA?” · “Do you accept SSDI award letters as qualifying income, and gross-up how much?” · “What documentation triggers manual underwrite for self-employed files?”
Method & boundaries for everything above: research hub · public corrections log · agent access: llms.txt