FDIC Statistics on Depository Institutions (SDI) Explained

The FDIC's Statistics on Depository Institutions (SDI) is a publicly accessible database that aggregates financial and structural data reported by FDIC-insured banks and savings institutions across the United States. This page explains what SDI covers, how the system collects and organizes data, where it applies in regulatory and analytical practice, and how it differs from related FDIC data products. Understanding SDI is essential for anyone conducting bank-level financial analysis, supervisory research, or industry benchmarking against the broader FDIC resource index.

Definition and scope

The FDIC Statistics on Depository Institutions database is a structured repository of financial performance, balance sheet, income, and structural information for every FDIC-insured institution. The underlying data is sourced from the Consolidated Reports of Condition and Income — commonly called Call Reports — which all FDIC-insured commercial banks and state-chartered savings banks file quarterly with their primary federal regulator.

SDI covers all institutions whose deposits are insured under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act. As of the data reflected in FDIC publications, the insured institution universe has included more than 4,500 active commercial banks and savings institutions, though that count changes each quarter as charters are opened, merged, or failed. The database extends back to 1934, making it one of the longest continuous financial time series in U.S. banking history.

Data fields in SDI span five broad categories:

1. Balance sheet items — assets, liabilities, equity capital, loan portfolios segmented by type (commercial real estate, consumer, agricultural, etc.)
2. Income statement items — net interest income, noninterest income, provision for loan losses, net income
3. Performance ratios — return on assets, return on equity, net interest margin, efficiency ratio
4. Structural characteristics — charter class, primary federal regulator, geographic location, number of offices, holding company affiliation
5. Asset quality metrics — noncurrent loan rates, charge-off rates, reserve coverage ratios

SDI is distinct from the FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile, which presents aggregated industry-level summaries. SDI operates at the individual institution level, allowing users to pull data for a single bank, a peer group, or the entire insured universe.

How it works

Institutions file Call Reports quarterly — in March, June, September, and December reporting cycles — with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC). The FDIC, as a member of the FFIEC, receives and processes these submissions through the FFIEC's Central Data Repository. The data is then standardized and loaded into SDI, typically becoming publicly available within 30 to 60 days of each quarter-end.

The SDI interface allows users to query data in three primary modes:

• Single institution search — retrieve all reported metrics for one bank by name, FDIC certificate number, or RSSD ID
• Peer group analysis — compare an institution against a defined peer group (e.g., all community banks with assets between $100 million and $300 million)
• Custom aggregate queries — filter the full insured universe by asset size, state, charter type, or performance threshold and export results

The FDIC certificate number is the stable identifier linking an institution's data across time. When a bank is acquired or merges, the surviving charter retains its certificate number, while the acquired charter is marked as inactive in the database. This lineage tracking is essential for longitudinal analysis, and it connects directly to data accessible through the FDIC BankFind Tool and the FDIC Historical Bank Data archive.

Common scenarios

Regulatory supervisory preparation. Examiners and analysts at the FDIC, OCC, and Federal Reserve use SDI to construct pre-examination profiles. Metrics such as the noncurrent loan ratio — loans 90 days or more past due as a share of total loans — signal asset quality deterioration before an on-site examination. This feeds directly into FDIC risk management supervision workflows.

Community bank benchmarking. A bank's board of directors may instruct management to compare the institution's net interest margin against the median for all FDIC-insured banks in the same asset tier and geographic region. SDI provides the peer-group filtering to construct that comparison without requiring a data licensing agreement.

Academic and policy research. The FDIC Community Banking Research program uses SDI as its primary dataset. Researchers isolating the performance of community banks — generally defined by the FDIC as institutions under $10 billion in assets that are not specialty institutions — draw on SDI's long time series to measure structural trends over business cycles.

Merger and acquisition due diligence. Acquirers conducting preliminary screening of acquisition targets use SDI to assess capital ratios, earnings trends, and loan concentration before initiating formal diligence. The FDIC's capital requirements framework thresholds are measurable through SDI's reported regulatory capital ratios.

Decision boundaries

SDI reports what institutions have filed; it does not adjudicate accuracy. If an institution files a materially incorrect Call Report, SDI reflects that error until an amended filing is processed. Users relying on SDI for supervisory or investment decisions must account for this filing-dependent limitation.

SDI vs. CALL Report raw data. The FFIEC makes full Call Report schedules available in machine-readable form through its Central Data Repository. SDI, by contrast, presents a curated subset of approximately 70 to 90 key metrics derived from those full schedules. Analysts requiring granular sub-schedule data — such as the full loan maturity distribution or detailed securities portfolio breakdowns — must access raw Call Report filings directly rather than SDI alone.

SDI vs. Thrift Financial Reports. Prior to 2012, federally chartered thrifts reported under the Thrift Financial Report (TFR) format administered by the Office of Thrift Supervision. After the OTS was abolished under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Pub. L. 111-203) and thrift supervision transferred to the OCC and Federal Reserve, former TFR filers migrated to Call Report format. SDI's pre-2012 data for those institutions reflects TFR-sourced figures, which carry definitional differences from Call Report equivalents — a material consideration for any analysis spanning that transition year.

Coverage limitation. SDI covers only FDIC-insured institutions. Credit unions supervised by the NCUA, non-bank financial companies, and foreign banking organizations operating U.S. branches are outside SDI's scope. For credit union comparative analysis, the FDIC vs. NCUA comparison addresses the structural differences between the two regulatory and data systems.