The 2025 survey yielded responses from 448 CDFIs, including loan funds (49 percent), credit unions (36 percent), banks and thrifts (11 percent). The remaining 4 percent of responses were from CDFIs that identified as venture capital funds, holding companies or other.

Seventy-two percent of CDFIs also carried special designations or community identifiers. Survey respondents included cooperativas (Puerto Rican cooperative credit unions that offer services both inside and outside of the community development finance space), Native CDFIs (which specifically serve Native American communities across the nation), minority depository institutions, community development corporations, and microenterprise development loan funds.

Almost all CDFI Survey respondents reported that they were currently certified by the CDFI Fund (95 percent). Over three-quarters of CDFIs that were not certified had already submitted a revised CDFI certification application or were planning to do so. (As a note, mission-driven lenders and financial institutions that are not CDFI certified can take the CDFI Survey.)

Compared to the CDFI Fund's list of certified CDFIs from June 2025, loan funds were overrepresented in the survey sample (49 percent compared to 41 percent), as were credit unions (36 percent compared to 32 percent). Banks were slightly underrepresented in the sample (11 percent compared to 14 percent).

Compared to the CDFI Fund's most recent Annual Certification and Data Collection Report (ACR), the 2025 CDFI Survey slightly undersampled CDFIs primarily offering consumer finance (37 percent versus the ACR's 41 percent) and slightly oversampled business lenders (29 percent versus 21 percent). The ACR does not report on home purchase and improvement lending and residential real estate lending separately; however, when combining these business lines for CDFI Survey responses, the sample is comparable (18 percent versus the ACR's 19 percent).

The top primary business lines reported by respondents this year were consumer finance (37 percent), small business finance (29 percent), and residential real estate finance (12 percent).

The primary business line differed by institution type. Most respondent credit unions (91 percent) primarily offered consumer finance products. CDFI banks primarily offered commercial real estate finance (44 percent) and small business finance (26 percent). Exactly half of loan fund respondents reported small business finance as their primary line of business, followed by residential real estate finance (18 percent) and home purchase/improvement finance (10 percent).

More than half of respondents indicated that they served multiple counties (or county equivalents) or one state, American Indian reservation or territory. The remainder were either hyper-local (serving just one county), multistate or national.

Most CDFIs dedicate most of their resources and time to serving urban areas (36 percent) or split their resources and time equally among urban, rural, and suburban areas (36 percent). Twenty-six percent of respondents primarily serve rural places.

This year, the CDFI Survey received responses from 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico had the largest representation in the survey, followed by Texas and California.

Puerto Rico and Texas were served by the most local or statewide (rather than national) CDFIs, followed by California, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. The only states or territories that did not have coverage outside of national CDFIs were Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Though the CDFI Fund did not exist prior to 1994, around 38 percent of survey respondents reported that they offered mission-driven financing before that. The majority of respondents started offering mission-driven financing after 1994, with several starting in the years immediately after the Great Recession.

Among respondents, loan funds had been offering mission-driven lending for fewer years than depositories. The average bank reported providing mission driven lending for about 32 years, with some delivering their products for more than 100 years. The average credit union had been in the business for 43 years, although there were several respondent credit unions that began their mission-based lending within the last 10 years. The average loan fund respondent had been in the CDFI business for 25 years.

As reported by the New York Fed, although the industry as a whole holds an estimated $450 billion in assets, CDFIs tend to be smaller than traditional financial institutions by asset size. For comparison, the largest mainstream financial institution in the United States holds over $3.6 trillion in assets.

In this report, small, medium, and large designations were defined by asset size. Size classification thresholds for banks are taken from the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council. Thresholds from 2023 were used in the 2025 questionnaire and text of this report for comparability to the 2023 CDFI Survey.

These size classifications were defined by the authors:

Using these definitions, the survey sample was comprised mostly of small or medium-sized CDFIs (91 percent). Loan funds are smaller than depository CDFIs: Forty-three percent of respondent loan funds had less than $50 million in assets; nineteen percent held $5 million or less.

Loan funds also tend to have leaner staff than credit unions or banks. Most loan funds had fewer than 50 full-time employees (87 percent), whereas 40 percent of banks had 100 employees or more.

CDFIs were asked to indicate and rank their top three funding sources. The most selected funding sources were earned income (68 percent of respondents) and federal funding (63 percent).

CDFIs focused on different primary business lines tend to rely on different funding sources. Sixty-seven percent of CDFIs that primarily offer consumer lending reported earned income as one of their top three funding sources, followed by deposits (65 percent) and federal funding (58 percent).

Meanwhile, CDFIs that focused on small business lending were most likely to report top funding sources as federal funding (69 percent), earned income (65 percent) and philanthropy (41 percent). Residential real estate lenders' top three sources tended to be: Earned income (59 percent), federal funding (46 percent), and other financial institutions (44 percent).