Inside Mortgage Finance is a respected industry publisher, and its denial-rate tables are widely cited in trade press. They are also sold behind a paywall and, for FHA, cover roughly the top 25 lenders. FinanceRateCalc computes the same class of statistics from the same public federal record — the CFPB HMDA loan-level data — and publishes them free, for 100 lenders, under a license that lets anyone reuse them.
| FinanceRateCalc | Inside Mortgage Finance | |
|---|---|---|
| FHA lenders covered | 100 largest | ~25 |
| Price | Free | Paid / subscription |
| License | CC BY 4.0 (reuse with credit) | Proprietary |
| 2025 data | Yes — full universe, 1,217,297 decisioned FHA applications | Yes (2025 coverage reported in trade press) |
| Extra axes | State × loan-size × denial-reason × pricing intersections | Lender tables |
| Machine-readable | Yes — open dataset on Hugging Face | No public dataset |
| Who pays us | Nobody. No lenders, no ads. | Subscribers |
This is not a claim that one product is "better." IMF serves industry subscribers with broad market coverage; we serve borrowers, journalists, and researchers who need lender-level denial behavior without a subscription. Both draw on the public HMDA record. The difference is access: our tables are free, our methodology is published, and our data can be loaded with one line of code from Hugging Face.
The free Top-100 table → Methodology → All open data →