Odds and Evens: the week's oddest true numbers in financial services, every Friday.
On June 30, 1984, the FDIC insured 17,889 banks. On June 30, 2026, it insured 4,238. In between, the count fell by 13,651, and that is after every new bank that opened along the way.
Source: FDIC, BankFind Suite; FDIC, Quarterly Banking Profile. Data as of 2026-06-30.
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| Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|
| 17,889 | FDIC-insured banks on June 30, 1984 |
| 4,238 | on June 30, 2026 |
| About six | fewer a week, net of new charters, for 42 years |
About six a week, every week
Spread over the 42 years, that is about six fewer banks a week, or about 330 a year. It is a net figure: new banks opened all along, and the count still fell.
Source: FDIC, BankFind Suite; FDIC, Quarterly Banking Profile. Data as of 2026-06-30.
Show the data
| Insured banks | Banking organizations | |
|---|---|---|
| 1984 | 17,889 | 14,961 |
| 1986 | 18,017 | 14,593 |
| 1988 | 16,993 | 13,522 |
| 1990 | 15,680 | 12,531 |
| 1992 | 14,237 | 11,386 |
| 1994 | 12,953 | 10,313 |
| 1996 | 11,672 | 9,344 |
| 1998 | 10,713 | 8,665 |
| 2000 | 10,102 | 8,282 |
| 2002 | 9,466 | 8,001 |
| 2004 | 9,078 | 7,752 |
| 2006 | 8,777 | 7,573 |
| 2008 | 8,451 | 7,341 |
| 2010 | 7,830 | 7,010 |
| 2012 | 7,245 | 6,612 |
| 2014 | 6,656 | 6,165 |
| 2016 | 6,058 | 5,640 |
| 2018 | 5,542 | 5,180 |
| 2020 | 5,066 | 4,747 |
| 2022 | 4,771 | 4,480 |
| 2024 | 4,538 | 4,284 |
| 2026 | 4,238 | 4,013 |
Not most years. Every year.
Banking organizations, which group every bank under the same holding company, make the steadiness plain. Their number never once rose from one year to the next.
Where the money went
It moved in together. The four largest banking organizations held 11.5% of insured bank assets in 1984 and hold 40.3% now.
Quiz answer
In which year did the count of insured banks first drop below 10,000? 2001.
If you sell to banks
Your prospect list has been getting shorter by about 330 names a year, whatever your CRM says. The banks that remain are larger, and so are their decisions. See who they are in the largest banks in the US, and how they merged in US bank mergers.
How we counted
Every FDIC-insured commercial bank and savings institution that filed a Call Report for June 30 of each year, and every banking organization those banks belong to, exactly as the Atlas page How concentrated is US banking? counts them, where every year is checked against the FDIC's Quarterly Banking Profile. Credit unions are not included. The weekly figure divides the net change by the weeks between the two dates.