The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule, 12 CFR part 1003, that carries out the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and sets which lenders report and what they report.
Regulation C is the rule that turns the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act into duties. It defines who must report. A bank, savings association or credit union reports if it is over an asset threshold, has a home or branch office in a metropolitan statistical area, made at least one first-lien home purchase loan or refinancing on a one-to-four-unit dwelling in the prior year, and in each of the two prior years originated at least 25 closed-end mortgage loans or at least 200 open-end lines of credit. A for-profit mortgage company reports on the same loan counts. For 2026, institutions with assets of $59 million or less as of December 31, 2025 are exempt from collecting data.
The rule also sets what is left out, including loans on unimproved land, temporary financing, loans primarily for agricultural purposes, and business-purpose loans that are not a purchase, improvement or refinancing of a dwelling.
This matters when you read lender data. A small rural bank can hold apartment loans and file no HMDA record at all. A bridge or construction lender may be missing because temporary financing is excluded. Absence from HMDA is a fact about the rule first.
How it shows up in the data here
Regulation C decides which lenders appear in this site's HMDA figures. A lender below the rule's tests files nothing, so a blank HMDA line on a lender page can mean no reporting duty, not no lending. Compare the HMDA count with the balance the same lender holds: see multifamily lenders for loans made and multifamily books for balances held. The methodology page explains both.
Go further
- Multifamily lenders: Lenders that made multifamily loans, from HMDA.
- Multifamily books: Multifamily balances held, from call reports.
- Methodology: How loans made and balances held differ.
- How to read HMDA data for multifamily and investor loans: HMDA is the one public file that lists individual apartment and rental-house loans by lender, amount, county and year. It covers loans on dwellings only, and not every lender reports.
Related terms
- Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA): The federal law that makes mortgage lenders collect and publish loan-level data on loans secured by a dwelling, including apartment buildings and 1-4 unit rentals.
- HMDA loan register (LAR): The loan-by-loan file a mortgage lender keeps and reports each year under HMDA, with one row for every covered loan and loan request and what happened to it.
- Legal Entity Identifier (LEI): A unique 20-character code, issued under the ISO 17442 standard, that identifies a legal entity anywhere in the world.
- Regulation B: The federal rule, 12 CFR part 1002, that carries out the Equal Credit Opportunity Act: it bars credit discrimination on prohibited bases and sets notice rules, for business credit as well as consumer credit.
- 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.
- Call report: The financial report every bank and savings association files with its federal regulator each quarter, with a balance sheet, an income statement and schedules that break out loans by kind.
Sources
Plain definitions for orientation, not legal, tax or credit advice. A lender's own policy decides what it will do.