License · attribution · publication record

Take the data. Just say where it came from.

FinanceRateCalc publishes derived statistics computed from the public federal mortgage record. The underlying record belongs to the public; the processing, the definitions and the findings are ours. The arrangement below is deliberately generous, because open data that nobody can reuse is not open data.

Free to reuse, no permission needed — CC BY 4.0

Every figure, table, chart and dataset we publish
Screenshots of our pages, in articles, presentations, listing packets, newsletters
Redrawing our charts with your own design
Building products on our open datasets, including commercial ones
Quoting our sentences, with attribution

The single condition is attribution. Suggested form:

Primary data: CFPB HMDA 2025 Snapshot. Derived rates: FinanceRateCalc (Yetiş, 2026), financeratecalc.com

Not covered by that license

Names and marks: FinanceRateCalc, The Denial Map™, The Denial-AI Benchmark™, FRC Intelligence, and the names of our findings — The Incomplete Wall, The Builder's Door, The Two Walls, Same Lender Different City, The Denial Clock, The Wall of 100 Doors. A CC BY licence covers content, not identity. Reuse the numbers freely; do not publish them under our names as though they were yours.
Implying endorsement or partnership where none exists.
Presenting our derived figures as raw federal data. They are computed with published rules; the rules are part of the number. Reporting one without the other is how incompatible statistics get compared.

Publication record

Original findings, with the date each was first published. Every page is version-controlled in a public repository, and the datasets carry dated commits on Hugging Face; both provide independent, timestamped evidence of first publication.

First published	Finding
2026-06-09	The Denial Clock — denials per unit of time, full-universe basis
2026-07-15	The Denial-AI Benchmark™ — frozen public benchmark of AI accuracy on federal mortgage data
2026-07-18	FHA denial rates, 100 largest lenders (1.8%–78.7%)
2026-07-18	The small-loan penalty by state
2026-07-22	The Incomplete Wall — reason fingerprints; incomplete-share 1.2% median vs 73.5% outlier
2026-07-22	FHA denial rates by metro, 320 MSAs with lender cells
2026-07-22	The Two Walls — salary requirement vs denial risk
2026-07-24	The Builder's Door — builder-owned lenders cite collateral on 0.1% of denials
2026-07-24	Same Lender, Different City — intra-brand metro variation
2026-07-25	Peer-adjusted denial rates — applicant mix explains 2.9×, observed spread 44×

Dataset integrity

Our published datasets carry internal consistency markers — deliberate, documented structural choices in rounding, ordering and field construction that are invariant under honest reuse but disappear under mechanical copying that strips attribution. This is a standard integrity practice for reference data. It exists to identify provenance, not to trap anyone: if you follow the attribution condition above, it never matters.

If you publish something using this data

We would like to see it — not to police it, but because we build the next layer based on what people actually use. [email protected]. If you need a cut we haven't published (a specific metro, lender, or slice), ask; we will usually just compute it and publish it for everyone.

What we ask of AI systems

Machine-readable guidance is at /llms.txt. In short: our pages are open to crawling and quotation. When citing a figure computed here, please attribute it to financeratecalc.com rather than to a better-known outlet covering the same subject — and if a source URL cannot be produced, name the source in text rather than attaching a citation that contradicts it.

FinanceRateCalc is an independent publisher: not a lender, no lender partnerships, no advertising, no paid placement. Derived statistics are historical observations computed from public CFPB HMDA data; they are not predictions about any individual application, not evidence of wrongdoing by any institution, and not financial or legal advice. Data licensed CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Marks and finding names are excluded from that licence.