Under the Community Reinvestment Act rules, a loan whose primary purpose is community development, such as affordable housing or financing for small businesses and farms.
The CRA rules in use define community development as four kinds of activity: affordable housing, including multifamily rental housing, for low- or moderate-income people; community services aimed at those people; economic development through financing businesses or farms that meet certain SBA size standards or have gross annual revenues of $1 million or less; and activities that revitalize or stabilize low- or moderate-income areas, designated disaster areas, and certain rural middle-income areas the agencies name.
A community development loan is a loan with one of those as its primary purpose. For most banks it must also benefit the bank’s assessment area or a broader statewide or regional area that includes it, and it cannot already be counted as a home mortgage, small business, small farm or consumer loan, with one exception: a multifamily loan can count in both places.
For a borrower, this is worth saying out loud. If your project is rent-restricted apartments, a clinic or childcare center serving lower-income families, or a business in a lower-income tract, tell the banker and document it. The loan must still pass credit, but it carries extra value for the bank. The agencies proposed changes to these rules in August 2026.
How it shows up in the data here
Community development loans are not flagged in the public files this site uses, so there is no field for them here. A bank reports only an aggregate count and amount to its regulator. The nearest view is lending by type: multifamily lenders for apartment loans made, and search for what each bank holds. A bank's CRA evaluation, on its regulator's site, describes the community development loans it made.
Go further
- Multifamily lenders: Lenders that made apartment loans.
- Search banks: Banks by loans held.
- How to read Community Reinvestment Act data: CRA data is the only public count of small business and small farm loans made by county. It is reported by larger banks only, in three size bands, with no borrower and no loan detail.
Related terms
- Community Reinvestment Act (CRA): The 1977 federal law that directs bank regulators to assess how well each bank helps meet the credit needs of its local communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
- Assessment area: The geographic area a bank draws around its main office, branches and deposit-taking ATMs, inside which regulators judge its record under the Community Reinvestment Act.
- Small business loan (CRA and call report definition): In bank reporting, a business loan with an original amount of $1,000,000 or less that is a commercial and industrial loan or is secured by nonfarm nonresidential real estate.
- Community development financial institution (CDFI): A lender the Treasury's CDFI Fund has certified as having a primary mission of community development and serving a defined target market.
- Multifamily (5+ units): Residential rental property with five or more units. Banks, credit unions and HMDA all draw the line between four units and five.
- Community bank: A community bank is a smaller bank that takes deposits and lends mostly in the area around its offices, and decides on loans close to home.
Sources
Plain definitions for orientation, not legal, tax or credit advice. A lender's own policy decides what it will do.