Number of Problem Banks (FDIC Problem Bank List)

## What this measures

The number of FDIC-insured institutions on the FDIC’s Problem Bank List at the end of each quarter, from 2006. A bank is on the list when its supervisory CAMELS composite rating is 4 or 5, the two worst grades, meaning financial, operational or managerial weaknesses that threaten its viability if not corrected.

## Why it matters

It is the regulators’ own count of banks in serious trouble. The list climbed from 2008 through 2010, alongside the wave of failures, and took years to shrink.

## How to read it

Higher is worse. Read it with the share of all banks it represents (credit.banks.problem_banks.share), because the number of banks has fallen steadily through mergers, and with failures (credit.banks.failures.count_quarterly). The FDIC describes one to two percent of banks as the normal range outside crises.

## What it does not say

The names on the list are confidential; only the count is published. Banks move on and off the list every quarter, so a flat count can hide churn. Since the first quarter of 2025 the FDIC no longer publishes the total assets of problem banks, so the list’s size in dollars cannot be tracked.

## How it's built

Read from the "Problem Banks-DATA" sheet of the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund trends workbook (columns Year, Quarter, Number of Problem Banks), dated at quarter end.

## Source

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Quarterly Banking Profile, "Deposit Insurance Fund trends charts and data" workbook (sheet "Problem Banks-DATA"), linked from fdic.gov/quarterly-banking-profile each quarter. Public domain: the FDIC data catalog (fdic.gov/data.json) licenses its banking data under the U.S. public domain label, use restriction "Unrestricted". Source: FDIC. Refreshed weekly by /api/cron/credit-banks-sync.