FDIC Summary of Deposits (SOD)

The FDIC Summary of Deposits (SOD) is the annual survey of branch-office deposits for all FDIC-insured institutions, recorded as of June 30 each year. For each branch it reports the institution, the branch location (address, city, county, state, and geocoordinates), and the deposits booked to that branch. It is used in, for example, Di Maggio, Ma & Williams for bank branch locations and deposits of the 50 largest banks, Beyhaghi, Fracassi & Weitzner for county-level branch counts, and Johnston-Ross, Ma & Puri for branch-level deposit balances and locations.

• Cost: free, no paywall.
• API key: none required.
• Coverage: every domestic branch of every FDIC-insured bank and thrift, annually since 1994.
• Home: https://www.fdic.gov/resources/data-tools/ (Summary of Deposits) · API: https://api.fdic.gov/banks/sod

Access

Option 1: FDIC API (no key, JSON)

The FDIC public API serves the SOD at https://api.fdic.gov/banks/sod. No key or authentication is needed.

curl -G "https://api.fdic.gov/banks/sod" \
  --data-urlencode "filters=YEAR:2022" \
  --data-urlencode "fields=NAMEFULL,STALPBR,CITYBR,DEPSUMBR,YEAR" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=10"

The response is JSON with a data[] array; each element is one branch-year record. Pagination is controlled by limit and offset parameters.

import requests, pandas as pd

params = {
    "filters": "YEAR:2022",
    "fields": "NAMEFULL,STALPBR,CITYBR,COUNTYNAME,DEPSUMBR,UNINUMBR,CERT,YEAR",
    "limit": 10000,
    "offset": 0,
}
r = requests.get("https://api.fdic.gov/banks/sod", params=params)
rows = [rec["data"] for rec in r.json()["data"]]
df = pd.DataFrame(rows)

Loop over offset in steps of 10,000 (the API maximum per call) to pull a full year; a single year holds roughly 70,000-80,000 branch records.

Option 2: Bulk download

The FDIC also publishes annual flat files at the Summary of Deposits page (https://www.fdic.gov/resources/data-tools/). Each year’s ZIP contains a pipe-delimited .csv with all branches. This is faster than paging the API for a full-year pull.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

• Headquarters-booking distortion. Deposits are booked to the branch of administrative assignment, not where the customer lives. Large banks concentrate a disproportionate share of deposits at one headquarters or main branch. Any branch-deposit geography measure is affected; papers that use SOD for deposit geography typically acknowledge or adjust for this.
• Annual June-30 snapshot only. There is no intra-year or quarterly frequency. The survey date is always June 30; do not treat it as a year-end figure.
• API host change. The API host moved from banks.data.fdic.gov to api.fdic.gov (the old host issues a 301 redirect). Pin the new host in your pipeline to avoid the redirect hop.
• Identifier reassignment at M&A. Branch identifiers (UNINUMBR) and institution certificate numbers (CERT) are reassigned at mergers and acquisitions. A naive year-over-year branch panel breaks at M&A events: track the acquirer’s CERT to link branches across a merger.
• Credit unions are absent. SOD covers only FDIC-insured banks and thrifts. Credit unions are not included; they are reported separately by the NCUA.

Citation

Cite the FDIC Summary of Deposits, the survey year (June 30 as-of date), and note whether the deposit geography was adjusted for the headquarters-booking issue, e.g.: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Summary of Deposits, [year] (as of June 30); https://www.fdic.gov/resources/data-tools/, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. Branch deposits not adjusted / adjusted for headquarters-booking concentration.