- LoanInspection
- Lender fees by loan type
What Are Lender Fees? Section A by Loan Type
Lender fees are the charges your lender keeps for making the loan. On the Loan Estimate they sit in Section A, Origination Charges, at the top of page 2. Everything else on that page goes to someone other than the lender or is held for taxes and insurance. This hub shows what lenders actually put in Section A on 3,787,575 real loans in the HMDA 2024 data, and links to a page for each program and purpose.
What the public record reports
Every lender covered by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act files one origination charges figure per loan. The rule defines it as the total of the borrower-paid amounts in Section A of the Closing Disclosure. It is one number. HMDA never splits it into an origination fee, an underwriting fee or points, so no public per-fee benchmark exists, and this site does not invent one. What can be measured is the total, which is what every page below and the inspection itself compares.
Program by purpose, HMDA 2024 data
Section A total, all sizes pooled25th to 75th percentile, median marked
Typical range, 25th to 75th percentileMedian
| Program and purpose | Loans | 25th to 75th percentile | Median | Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conventional purchase | 2,030,868 | $1,202 to $4,817 | $2,075 | Conventional purchase |
| FHA purchase | 598,473 | $1,440 to $5,811 | $3,089 | FHA purchase |
| VA purchase | 309,454 | $0 to $3,313 | $1,015 | VA purchase |
| Conventional refinance, rate and term | 221,821 | $995 to $4,717 | $1,805 | Conventional refinance |
| FHA refinance, rate and term | 54,767 | $0 to $4,699 | $950 | FHA refinance |
| VA refinance, rate and term | 104,153 | $1,329 to $4,658 | $2,755 | VA refinance |
| Conventional refinance, cash out | 258,835 | $1,674 to $6,593 | $3,828 | Coming |
| FHA refinance, cash out | 134,257 | $3,941 to $8,859 | $6,084 | Coming |
| VA refinance, cash out | 71,010 | $4,544 to $11,995 | $7,877 | Coming |
Source: HMDA public loan data, 2024, national, Section A total, points included. All sizes pooled.
Half of the loans in each group closed with a Section A total inside the 25th to 75th percentile span. A quarter closed under it and a quarter over it. Two groups start at $0: FHA rate-and-term refinances and VA purchases. Those pages explain what a zero in the record means.
Why each page splits the figures by loan size
A point is a percentage of the loan amount, so one point on a $500,000 loan is more than three times the dollars of one point on a $150,000 loan. Flat charges such as underwriting or processing do not move with the amount. A single national figure blends the two, and it blends small and large loans together. Each program page therefore shows four bands: under $150,000, $150,000 to under $300,000, $300,000 to under $500,000, and $500,000 and up. Exactly $300,000 belongs to the third band and exactly $500,000 to the fourth. The inspection matches your loan to its band before it grades the total.
What these figures leave out
- Sections B through H of the Loan Estimate. Appraisal, credit report, flood certification, title services, recording, transfer taxes, prepaid interest, insurance and escrow deposits are not lender fees and are not in HMDA's origination charges field.
- The FHA upfront mortgage insurance premium and the VA funding fee. Both are disclosed in Section B, Services You Cannot Shop For, and both are set by the program rather than the lender.
- Lender credits. The figures are gross Section A with nothing netted against them.
- Rates. The fee dataset contains no rate data at all. Rate grading in the inspection uses separate daily lock indices described on the methodology page.
- Geography. Every figure is national.
The USDA gap
There is no USDA page yet. People do search for USDA closing costs, but the published dataset holds conventional, FHA and VA loans only, and this site does not show a figure it cannot source. A USDA page will follow if and when USDA rows are added to the dataset.
The data behind every page
The full table, the CSV download and the citation line live on State of Mortgage Fees, 2024 data year. The same file is published on Kaggle and Hugging Face under CC BY 4.0. How the inspection turns these ranges into a grade for your own Loan Estimate is described step by step at /methodology.
Reviewed on October 2026.
Your Section A total, read against the public record
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Sources
- FFIEC, HMDA Loan Application Register, 2024 data year: https://ffiec.cfpb.gov/data-publication/
- 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(18) (HMDA origination charges, borrower-paid Section A total): https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/1003/4/
- Official comment 37(f)(2)-2 to 12 CFR 1026.37 (upfront mortgage insurance fee and government funding fee as Section B examples): https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/1026/37/
- CFPB Loan Estimate explainer: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/owning-a-home/loan-estimate/
- LoanInspection, State of Mortgage Fees, 2024 data year: /data/mortgage-fees