How Many Community Banks Are Left

Ask how many community banks there are and you get vague answers. Here is a specific one, and it updates itself.

As of the most recent FDIC reporting quarter, there are 3,146 active insured banks with total assets between $100 million and $2 billion. That is the band this publication covers: big enough to have a real balance sheet, small enough that deposit growth is a genuine strategic problem rather than a rounding error.

The figure matters less as a single number than as a trend. It falls almost every quarter. New bank charters are rare; mergers are not. Each acquisition removes a charter from the count, and the acquired bank's deposits move to the buyer. The long arc is fewer, larger institutions.

For everyone still in the band, that has a direct consequence. The same deposits are being chased by a shrinking set of competitors, and the survivors are, on average, getting bigger and better resourced. Standing still is losing ground. The banks that grow deposits in this environment are the ones that treat it as the core problem, not a marketing afterthought.

This number is a live figure. It is recomputed from FDIC data each quarter and updated in place, so the count above is current as of the date on this brief, not the date we first published it.

Methodology

The count is the number of active FDIC-insured institutions with total assets between $100M and $2B at the latest available reporting quarter, taken directly from the FDIC BankFind Suite API. It is refreshed automatically when the FDIC posts a new quarter.