FFIEC Call Reports: US bank condition and income filings

Call Reports (FFIEC Reports of Condition and Income, forms FFIEC 031 / 041 / 051) are the quarterly regulatory filings every US insured depository institution submits. They are the canonical free, bank-level panel for balance sheet, income statement, loan composition, deposits, capital, and past due items, going back decades. This page is the access recipe for the two public paths: the FDIC financials API (clean JSON) and the FFIEC bulk schedules (raw MDRM items).

• Cost: free, no auth, no API key.
• Coverage: every FDIC-insured bank and thrift, quarterly. FDIC financials API reaches back to 1992; FFIEC bulk Call Reports go back further per form.
• Granularity: one filing per (institution, quarter-end).
• Home: FDIC API https://api.fdic.gov/banks/ · FFIEC bulk https://cdr.ffiec.gov/public/

Access

Option 1: FDIC financials API (JSON, no auth, cleaned series)

A no-key JSON API serving FDIC-computed financials derived from the Call Reports. Filter on REPDTE (the quarter-end report date, YYYYMMDD) and pick fields:

import requests

def fdic_financials(repdte="20231231", limit=10000, fields="CERT,NAME,ASSET,DEP,NETINC,REPDTE"):
    r = requests.get(
        "https://api.fdic.gov/banks/financials",
        params={"filters": f"REPDTE:{repdte}", "fields": fields,
                "limit": limit, "format": "json"},
        timeout=60,
    )
    r.raise_for_status()
    return [row["data"] for row in r.json()["data"]]

q4 = fdic_financials("20231231")   # ~4,660 banks that quarter

The companion /banks/institutions endpoint is the bank master (name, state, charter, and the identifier bridge): pull it to map CERT to the Fed RSSD.

import requests
inst = requests.get(
    "https://api.fdic.gov/banks/institutions",
    params={"filters": "CERT:3511", "fields": "CERT,NAME,FED_RSSD,STALP"},
    timeout=30,
).json()["data"][0]["data"]
# {'CERT': 3511, 'FED_RSSD': '451965', 'NAME': 'Wells Fargo Bank, ...'}

Option 2: FFIEC bulk schedules (raw MDRM items)

For items the FDIC series does not expose, download the raw Call Report schedules at https://cdr.ffiec.gov/public/PWS/DownloadBulkData.aspx: pick “Call Reports — Single Period” (or balance-sheet / income / past-due subsets), choose a quarter, and get a ZIP of tab-delimited schedule files keyed by IDRSSD. Each column is an MDRM code (see gotchas). Programmatic pulls of this path go through the FFIEC Public Web Service (PWS), which needs a free registered account token; the bulk web download itself is an ASP.NET postback, not a clean GET.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

The reason to read this page rather than the FDIC/FFIEC sites. Verified live on the date above (financials and institutions endpoints pulled; the host 301 and the YTD-income behavior were reproduced).

• The FDIC API host moved. banks.data.fdic.gov now issues a 301 to api.fdic.gov/banks/... (confirmed live). A client that does not resend the query on redirect, or a hard-coded old host, silently breaks. Request api.fdic.gov/banks directly.
• Amounts are in thousands of dollars. ASSET of 1687507000 is $1.687 trillion, not $1.7 billion (confirmed: Wells Fargo, CERT 3511, 2023-Q1). Scale by 1,000 before reporting dollars.
• Income items are year-to-date, not quarterly. NETINC is cumulative within the calendar year: Wells Fargo CERT 3511 reads 6,017,000 at 2023-03-31 and 11,455,000 at 2023-06-30 (confirmed live). The Q2 quarterly flow is the difference (11,455,000 - 6,017,000), and Q1 YTD equals Q1 quarterly. Differencing the wrong way double-counts Q1.
• Three identifiers, do not confuse them. CERT (FDIC certificate) keys the FDIC API; IDRSSD / RSSD (Federal Reserve) keys the raw FFIEC bulk schedules and NIC; the OCC/OTS charter is a third. Join FDIC-API data to raw FFIEC items via FED_RSSD from the institutions endpoint (CERT 3511 -> RSSD 451965).
• The form differs by bank, so a field may not exist for every filer. FFIEC 031 (banks with foreign offices), 041 (domestic only), and 051 (small banks under $5B, streamlined with fewer schedules) carry different item sets. Do not assume a schedule or MDRM code is present for every institution.
• RCFD vs RCON prefix. In the raw schedules, the same concept appears as a consolidated item (RCFD..., includes foreign offices) and a domestic item (RCON...). Total assets is RCFD2170 consolidated vs RCON2170 domestic; mixing them across banks under-counts or double-counts.
• Mergers break naive panels. Banks enter and exit via M&A; a CERT/RSSD can be retired. Build the panel with the NIC structure/transformations table, not by assuming identifier continuity.
• Quarter-end only, and amended filings exist. REPDTE is always a quarter-end (0331, 0630, 0930, 1231). Banks file late amendments, so “as filed” and “amended” can differ; the FDIC API serves a cleaned series.
• The confidential supervisory overlay is a distinct source. Holding-company filings (FR Y-9C) and the stress-test panel (FR Y-14) are restricted and tracked under separate slugs. Call Reports are the public bank-level layer.

Identifiers and key fields

Field	Meaning
CERT	FDIC certificate number; the FDIC-API key
FED_RSSD / IDRSSD	Federal Reserve RSSD ID; keys the FFIEC bulk schedules and NIC
REPDTE	Report date, always a quarter-end (YYYYMMDD)
ASSET	Total assets (thousands of dollars)
DEP	Total deposits (thousands)
NETINC	Net income, year-to-date (thousands)
RCFD2170 / RCON2170	Total assets, consolidated / domestic (raw MDRM)

Standard operations

• Bank-quarter panel: stack /banks/financials across REPDTE, key on (CERT, REPDTE); map to RSSD once via the institutions endpoint.
• Quarterly flows: difference YTD income/flow items within the calendar year (Q_n quarterly = Q_n YTD - Q_{n-1} YTD; Q1 quarterly = Q1 YTD).
• Ratios: compute ROA, capital, and loan-mix ratios from levels you pulled, rather than trusting a precomputed field across form changes.
• Raw items: when the FDIC series lacks an item, pull the FFIEC schedule by MDRM code, choosing RCFD vs RCON deliberately.
• Always state the report quarter, the form (031/041/051) if it matters, and whether a figure is a level or a YTD/quarterly flow.

Citation

Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Consolidated Reports of Condition and Income (Call Reports); retrieved via the FDIC financials API (https://api.fdic.gov/banks/) / FFIEC CDR (https://cdr.ffiec.gov/public/), accessed YYYY-MM-DD.