On July 31, 2026, the OCC and FDIC quietly proposed a rule change that would erase $102 billion in small business lending data from public view.

Not reduce it. Not delay it. Erase it.

If the proposal goes final, 417 banks will stop filing annual reports on whether they lend to small businesses in low-income communities. Six states will lose roughly a quarter of their small business lending data overnight. And the 16-point approval gap between women and men at large banks — 52% versus 68% — will become harder to prove, because the measurement tool that exposed it is being dismantled.

The public comment period closes October 13, 2026. After that, the agencies decide without you.

What Is the CRA, and Why Should You Care?

The Community Reinvestment Act is a 1977 federal law that says banks cannot take deposits from a community and then refuse to lend there. It requires banks to demonstrate they are serving the credit needs of the neighborhoods where they operate — including low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas.

For women business owners, CRA is not an abstraction. It is the mechanism that forces banks to prove they are not redlining your neighborhood. It is the reason regulators know that lending discrimination exists in the first place.

Without CRA data, there is no baseline. Without a baseline, there is no accountability.

What the OCC and FDIC Are Proposing

The proposal raises two asset thresholds that determine how much a bank has to report about its lending:

These are not cosmetic changes. The category a bank falls into determines what it must report and how it is evaluated.

Small banks get the lightest CRA exam. They are tested on whether they make loans in their communities, but they do not have to report granular small business lending data. They face no separate community development test.

Intermediate small banks currently must pass a community development test — demonstrating investment in affordable housing, small business support, and community services. Under the new thresholds, banks with up to $10 billion in assets would be reclassified out of that requirement.

The numbers the agencies do not put on the first page

According to NCRC’s analysis of the proposal:

That last point matters most if you operate outside a major metro area. CRA data is often the only window into whether banks are serving rural and small-city markets. Remove the window, and there is nothing left to look through.

Exterior of a community bank branch in a small town

Why This Is a Women’s Funding Issue

You might think CRA reform is a banking regulation story. It is. But it is also the story of how we know what we know about lending discrimination.

The approval gap we can measure — for now

The 16-point gap between women’s and men’s approval rates at large banks is not a guess. It comes from Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey data, cross-referenced with CRA-reported lending volumes and HMDA disclosures. CRA data is one leg of the stool. Remove it, and the picture becomes incomplete.

This is the same dynamic playing out with Section 1071 lending transparency rules — the data infrastructure that makes discrimination visible is being weakened from multiple directions simultaneously. CRA thresholds go up. Section 1071 gets delayed and narrowed. The CFPB loses enforcement capacity. Each cut looks manageable in isolation. Together, they are a systematic collapse of the protections women business owners rely on.

Who vanishes from the data

The 417 banks that would stop reporting are not JPMorgan Chase. They are community banks, regional lenders, and agricultural banks — exactly the institutions that serve markets where relationship lending is already disappearing.

These are the banks most likely to serve:

When a $900 million community bank stops reporting its small business lending data, the regulators lose the ability to check whether it is actually lending to the community. The bank is still covered by CRA — it just does not have to prove compliance in the same way.

The Federal Reserve’s Silence Is Loud

Here is something the OCC and FDIC would prefer you not notice: the Federal Reserve did not join this rulemaking.

The Fed, OCC, and FDIC typically move together on CRA changes. In 2023, all three agencies issued a joint final rule modernizing CRA regulations. That rule was the product of years of public input and represented a rare interagency consensus.

This proposal breaks that consensus. The OCC and FDIC are moving alone, raising thresholds that the Fed has not endorsed. The Covington analysis of the proposal notes that this creates the possibility of different CRA standards depending on a bank’s primary federal regulator — something the 2023 rule was specifically designed to prevent.

When two of three agencies move and the third stays quiet, ask who benefits from the silence.

What “$102 Billion in Unreported Lending” Actually Means

That figure is not the amount of lending that would disappear. The loans would still be made — or not made. The difference is that no one outside the bank would know.

CRA small business lending data is used by:

Remove the reporting requirement, and the bank’s word becomes the only source. Given what we already know about how lending discrimination operates — through loan officer bias documented across 31 studies, through algorithms trained on biased data, through “credit elsewhere” tests that penalize married women — the bank’s word is not sufficient.

The Community Development Domino

The threshold increase does not just affect lending data. It eliminates the community development test for banks that move from “intermediate small” to “small” classification.

The community development test evaluates whether banks invest in:

According to NCRC, approximately $26 billion in community development loans would no longer be evaluated under separate CRA examination. Banks would still be free to make these investments. They just would not be required to demonstrate they are doing so.

For women business owners, community development lending includes the programs that fill gaps the conventional market ignores: CDFI partnerships, small-dollar loan programs, technical assistance funding, and microenterprise support. These are disproportionately where women get their first business loan.

FAQ: CRA Threshold Changes and Women Business Owners

Does this mean banks will stop lending to small businesses?
No. Banks can still lend. The change is about reporting and accountability. A bank that stops reporting can still lend — it just does not have to prove it is doing so equitably.

Will this affect my ability to get a loan?
Not directly or immediately. The impact is structural and long-term. Less data means less oversight, which means less pressure on banks to serve underserved markets. Over time, that erodes the lending environment for everyone the current system was designed to protect.

Why are the OCC and FDIC doing this?
The stated rationale is regulatory burden. The agencies argue that smaller banks face disproportionate compliance costs and that raising thresholds will reduce that burden. The unstated effect is that 417 banks — controlling $102 billion in small business lending — exit the reporting regime.

What is the Community Reinvestment Act?
CRA is a 1977 federal law requiring banks to meet the credit needs of the communities where they take deposits, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. It was passed to combat redlining — the practice of refusing to lend in certain neighborhoods based on their racial or economic composition.

What does “LMI census tract” mean?
A low-to-moderate-income census tract is a geographic area where the median family income is below 80% of the area median. CRA requires banks to demonstrate they serve these communities. Over 5,000 bank branches in LMI tracts would lose their separate community development evaluations under this proposal.

How to Submit a Comment Before October 13

This is not symbolic. Federal agencies are legally required to read and respond to substantive public comments. The 2023 CRA rulemaking received over 1,000 comments, and the final rule was materially changed in response to public input.

Woman focused at laptop writing a comment in home office

Step-by-step: submit through regulations.gov

  1. Go to regulations.gov and search for the docket number. The OCC proposal is listed under docket ID OCC-2026-0012 and the FDIC proposal under FDIC-2026-N-XX. (Confirm the exact FDIC docket number on the Federal Register notice.)
  2. Click “Comment” on the relevant docket.
  3. Write your comment. You do not need to be a lawyer. You do need to be specific. See below for what to say.
  4. Submit before 11:59 PM ET on October 13, 2026.

What to say in your comment

A one-sentence “I oppose this” counts but does not carry weight. Here is what does:

If you are a woman business owner:

If you operate in one of the six hardest-hit states (Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota):

Structural points anyone can make:

You can also submit by mail

Send written comments to both:

Mail must be received — not postmarked — by October 13.

What Happens After October 13

The agencies will review comments, publish a response, and issue a final rule. This can take months. If the final rule goes through largely as proposed, the reporting changes would take effect at the start of the next CRA examination cycle.

There are three potential outcomes:

  1. The rule goes final as proposed. 417 banks exit the reporting regime. Data gaps widen. Accountability weakens.
  2. The rule is modified. Public comments push the agencies to raise thresholds but preserve data reporting requirements — a compromise that reduces exam burden without creating a data blackout.
  3. The rule is withdrawn or indefinitely delayed. Unlikely without significant political pressure, but not unprecedented.

Option 2 is the realistic win. The agencies want to reduce compliance burden for smaller banks — that is a legitimate policy goal. The problem is that they have bundled burden reduction with data elimination. Those can be separated. A bank can file a simpler exam and still report its lending data.

Your comment should push for that separation.

The Bigger Picture: Measurement Is the First Thing to Go

This proposal does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern.

Section 1071 — the first-ever requirement for lenders to report small business lending data by race and gender — has been delayed, narrowed, and challenged in court since its finalization. The CFPB, which was supposed to enforce it, has been gutted. State-level fair lending enforcement is a patchwork that varies wildly by zip code.

Now CRA reporting thresholds go up, and another 417 banks exit the data ecosystem.

Every one of these changes has a reasonable-sounding justification. Reduce regulatory burden. Streamline compliance. Let small banks focus on lending instead of paperwork. And every one of them has the same structural effect: making it harder to prove that discrimination exists.

Discrimination does not need darkness to operate. But darkness makes it more efficient.

In a lending market where transparency is actively shrinking, knowing your options matters more than ever. Lenders like Lendesca that publish their rates, terms, and eligibility criteria upfront represent what the system should look like — borrowers seeing the math before they apply, not after. But individual lender transparency cannot substitute for systemic data collection. That requires regulation.

What You Can Do This Week

The 16-point approval gap did not reveal itself. Someone measured it. If the measurement disappears, the gap does not close. It just becomes invisible.

October 13.

HerCapital covers the funding barriers women business owners face — and the systems that create them. Read more about how lending discrimination works and the six federal protections that are disappearing.

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