Five things everyone repeats about mortgages, checked against 1,217,297 decisioned FHA applications from the complete 2025 federal HMDA dataset. All five fail the check — the 43% ceiling isn’t where denials happen, the soft door doesn’t cost more, the harshest leaderboards partly measure paperwork, the smallest loans are the hardest, and the manufactured-home penalty depends on the door you knock on.
The myth every borrower hears. The federal record disagrees twice over: St. Louis Fed research on 30 million applications (Garcia & Garriga, 2026) finds denial rates flat from 20% to 50% DTI, spiking only at 50. And our lender-level surfaces show the wall that actually matters is your lender’s: one major lender’s denial rate jumps 23.5 points between DTI 44 and 45 — five points before the market’s wall.
See every lender’s wall →Checked against 60 lenders’ actual originated loans: the correlation between denial rate and median rate spread in 2025 was −0.25 — slightly negative. The soft door does not cost more. (The only lenders pricing below market are builder-affiliated buydown shops — a different story entirely.)
Rates and odds, side by side →Often it means a leaky funnel, not a hard judge. Low-denial lenders deny on math: DTI ~30%, credit ~23% of cited reasons. The highest-denial lenders deny on paperwork: incomplete applications were 73.5% of Carrington’s cited reasons, 41.0% of AmeriSave’s. Part of the leaderboard measures process design — which is exactly why we publish reasons next to rates.
The reason fingerprint →The record shows the opposite, in a perfectly monotonic staircase: under $100K, 46.9% of FHA applications were denied in 2025; over $400K, 18.5%. And below $150K the killers aren’t math — they’re credit history, the property itself, and files dying incomplete. America’s affordability crisis starts at the underwriting desk.
The small-loan penalty →The penalty is real — but it lives at specific doors. Nationally the gap is mild (23.3% vs 21.8% site-built). At Rocket, manufactured applications were denied 38.7% of the time versus 29.8% overall; at CrossCountry, 6.9%. Same home, different door, different answer.
The manufactured-home map →Every number above comes from federal HMDA filings, processed independently — sources and thresholds on each linked page, methodology here. Myths reflect common industry shorthand, not any specific source; observed rates reflect applicant mix and channel as well as underwriting. Historical observation, not advice.
“Five common mortgage beliefs — including the 43% DTI ceiling — fail when checked against 1,217,297 federal records from 2025, according to FinanceRateCalc.”