The FDIC's problem bank list has 47 banks and no public names

Forty-seven banks sit on a list that depositors cannot inspect.

That is the latest count in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Quarterly Banking Profile, measured at June 30, 2026. It is 47, not the 60 still quoted by several pages that rank for the search. It is also only a count. The agency does not publish the banks' names, and since February 2025 it no longer publishes their combined assets.

The missing detail is deliberate. A bank reaches the FDIC's problem bank list after supervisors assign it a confidential CAMELS composite rating of 4 or 5. Examination records receive specific protection under federal disclosure law. The agency releases enough information to show the direction of supervisory concern across the industry, while withholding the information that would turn an aggregate measure into a run list.

This makes the series useful, but only within narrow limits. It can show whether supervisory stress is spreading across insured banks. It cannot identify the next institution to fail, tell a depositor whether a named bank is on the list or explain why any one bank received its rating.

How many banks are on the FDIC problem bank list now?

The latest published count is 47 banks at June 30, 2026, down from 54 three months earlier and 59 a year earlier. Those banks represented 1.1 percent of the industry. The figure is a quarter-end supervisory count released with a lag, not a live tally of bank distress.

The second-quarter drop was seven banks, or 13.0 percent. Over 12 months, the count fell by 12 banks, or 20.3 percent. The FDIC described the current share as being within the normal range of 1 to 2 percent for non-crisis periods.

That sentence matters more than the raw count. The number of insured institutions has contracted for decades through mergers and closures, so 47 problem banks now represent a larger slice of the industry than 47 did 20 years ago. In the FDIC's downloadable series, Q3 2006 also had exactly 47 problem banks, but they represented 0.54 percent of the industry. The current 1.11 percent share is a little more than twice as large.

The Q2 figure is also lower than the recent local high. The count rose from 39 at the end of 2022 to 68 in Q3 2024, an increase of 74.4 percent. It has since fallen by 21 banks, or 30.9 percent. The shape is a rise followed by six quarters of uneven retreat, including a brief increase from 57 to 60 at the end of 2025.

No straight line survives contact with the data.

Why does the FDIC publish a count but not the names?

The names would reveal confidential examination judgments about individual banks. The FDIC publishes an industry total to show the scale of supervisory concern, but federal law protects records tied to bank examinations. A public roster could also provoke withdrawals before a bank had time to correct weaknesses identified by its regulators.

The legal structure is direct. Section 552(b)(8) of Title 5 covers records contained in or related to examination, operating or condition reports prepared by or for a financial regulator. The FDIC carries that exemption into 12 CFR Part 309. Section 309.5(g)(8) identifies the protected category, and section 309.6 limits disclosure to specified circumstances.

The rule does not say that every supervisory fact can never leave the agency. It permits disclosures to regulated institutions, other supervisors, law enforcement authorities and certain third parties when the conditions are met. It does say that the records are not an ordinary public dataset available on demand.

The bank itself is constrained too. In Financial Institution Letter 13-2005, the federal banking agencies told institutions that CAMELS ratings and reports of examination are non-public supervisory information. The letter says banks generally may not give that material to unrelated third parties without permission from the appropriate regulator.

That closes the obvious workaround. A bank cannot treat its rating as a marketing credential when it is good, then claim confidentiality only when it deteriorates. The rating belongs to the supervisory process.

What does a CAMELS rating of 4 or 5 mean?

Every bank on the problem list has a composite CAMELS rating of 4 or 5. CAMELS reviews capital, asset quality, management, earnings, liquidity and sensitivity to market risk. The composite is a supervisory judgment about the institution as a whole, not a formula produced by averaging six public financial ratios.

The current QBP states the placement rule in a footnote. It also says banks commonly enter and leave the list each quarter. That second point is essential because a problem designation is a condition under supervision, not an announcement that failure is inevitable.

A bank can have financial, operational or managerial weaknesses severe enough to warrant a 4 or 5 composite rating. Those weaknesses can be corrected. Capital can be raised, troubled assets can be sold, management can change and a formal enforcement action can be satisfied. A bank can also merge into another institution. Each path can remove a name from the confidential list without a failure.

The reverse is true as well. A bank can deteriorate between public reporting dates, and the public cannot observe the exact timing of a confidential rating change. The quarterly total is therefore a measure of the stock of supervised problems at a past date. It is not a real-time monitor.

The six letters also invite a common error. Public call reports contain capital, asset and earnings data, but the composite rating incorporates examination work and supervisory judgment that a spreadsheet does not reproduce. A screen built from public ratios may identify weak-looking banks. It cannot truthfully recreate the FDIC list.

Did the FDIC stop publishing problem-bank assets?

Yes. In February 2025, the FDIC said it would stop disclosing the listed banks' aggregate assets and return to publishing only the count. It had added the asset total at year-end 1990. The agency concluded that the number could reveal a large bank or lead observers to identify the wrong one.

The change removed the one public figure that gave the count a sense of scale. Forty-seven community banks and 47 large regional banks would present very different potential exposure to the Deposit Insurance Fund. The total assets line did not name institutions, but a sharp quarterly increase could narrow the field if one large bank had recently attracted public attention.

That was the concern in the FDIC's statement on problem-bank assets. Acting Chairman Travis Hill set out four possible failures of the old disclosure. Observers might correctly identify a large bank and start a disorderly run. Supervisors might hesitate to downgrade it. The public might identify the wrong bank. Or a downgrade unrelated to near-term insolvency might be read as a failure warning.

The agency also pointed to the lag and the judgment involved in ratings. By the time the aggregate asset number appeared, the underlying supervisory position could already have changed. A precise-looking total could invite a false inference from incomplete information.

The cost is clear. The public can now see whether there are 47 problem banks, but not whether they hold $5bn or $500bn of assets. The count remains comparable with the historical number series. Its economic weight does not.

What does the 20-year history show?

The series is dominated by the 2008 financial crisis and its long supervisory aftermath. The count climbed from 48 in Q1 2006 to a peak of 888 in Q1 2011, then fell below 100 in 2017. At 47 today, it is 94.7 percent beneath that peak.

The FDIC's Q2 2026 charts and data provide a quarterly series beginning in 2006. Selected points show the climb, the slow repair and the smaller increase that began in 2023.

Quarter	Problem banks	Share of banks
Q1 2006	48	0.55%
Q4 2008	252	3.03%
Q4 2009	702	8.76%
Q1 2011	888	11.72%
Q4 2014	291	4.47%
Q4 2018	60	1.11%
Q4 2022	39	0.83%
Q3 2024	68	1.51%
Q4 2025	60	1.38%
Q2 2026	47	1.11%

The peak count came more than two years after the recession began and after the most acute phase of the financial panic. That lag is visible without attaching a causal story to every quarterly move. Supervisory classifications accumulate as examinations identify weaknesses, and they recede as banks repair, merge or fail.

The share supplies a second check. Problem banks were 11.72 percent of the industry at the peak and 1.11 percent in Q2 2026, a decline of 90.6 percent. The count fell slightly more because the banking industry itself now contains fewer institutions.

The post-2022 increase was real. It was also small beside the crisis era. From 39 at the end of 2022, the count reached 68 in Q3 2024 before declining to 47. Reading only the direction would make the 2023 and 2024 increase sound like a replay of 2008. Reading the level would erase the increase entirely. Both readings are incomplete.

Is the problem-bank count a forecast of failures?

No. It is a count of banks with weak confidential supervisory ratings at a quarter-end. Some listed banks recover, recapitalize or merge. Some fail. The public record does not identify which failed banks were previously on the list, so outsiders cannot convert the aggregate count into a current institution-level failure probability.

The difference is visible in the FDIC's own releases. The Q2 profile counted 47 problem banks and reported two bank failures with $517m in assets through June 30. The separate failed-bank list now names five 2026 failures through August 21. One series is confidential supervision summarized as a count. The other is a public record of completed receiverships.

Those five public failures do not reveal five names from the earlier problem list. The records cannot be joined because the supervisory side withholds identities. It would be reasonable to expect severe supervisory concern before many failures, but the public data does not support a bank-by-bank match.

Nor does the count describe the loss to the insurance fund. The size of a failed bank, the quality of its assets, the bids received for its deposits and assets, and the structure of the resolution all matter. Since the FDIC stopped publishing aggregate assets for problem banks, the current count says even less about the possible dollar scale than it once did.

This is why the list is best read as a breadth measure. It tells us how many institutions occupy the two weakest composite rating categories. It does not tell us the amount at risk or the date, identity and cost of a future failure.

What can the public see instead of the list?

The public can see every completed bank failure, quarterly industry totals, call-report financial statements, deposit-insurance status and many formal enforcement actions. These records answer different questions. None discloses a bank's confidential CAMELS rating, and combining them does not create an official substitute for the FDIC problem bank list.

The failed-bank list is the cleanest distinction. It names the institution, location, certificate number, acquiring institution, closing date and insurance-fund number after a closure. There is no comparable public table for open banks that carry problem status.

Quarterly Banking Profile tables show the condition of the industry and groups of banks. Call reports go further by publishing institution-level balance sheets and income statements. They can show capital ratios, loan performance, securities positions, funding and earnings. They remain reports filed by banks, not the examiner's confidential composite conclusion.

Formal enforcement actions can reveal that a regulator required a bank to change conduct, strengthen controls, raise capital or address another deficiency. Their existence is public where the agency releases them. An enforcement action and a problem-bank designation are not synonyms, and one should not be presented as proof of the other.

Deposit insurance status answers the question most directly connected to the FDIC's public mission: whether an institution is insured and how its legal entity is identified. It does not answer whether supervisors rate the bank a 4 or 5.

Each record has a boundary. The false comfort comes from treating any one of them as the hidden list.

What does the current count tell us, and what does it leave unknown?

The count says supervisory stress narrowed in Q2 2026 and stands near the FDIC's normal non-crisis range. It also remains 20.5 percent above the 39-bank low at the end of 2022. It does not reveal the banks, their assets, their weaknesses or how many will eventually fail.

That is a modest conclusion, but it is the conclusion the documents support. The list is far smaller than it was after 2008. The share is below the 2024 local high. The latest quarter moved in the favorable direction.

The remaining uncertainty is structural rather than accidental. Federal law protects the examination record. The FDIC withholds the names. Its 2025 policy now withholds aggregate assets too. More searching does not produce a public list because no public list exists.

What remains is a count with a long history. Read as an industry gauge, it is informative. Read as a directory of banks to avoid, it is a category error.

Frequently asked questions about the FDIC problem bank list

Is the FDIC problem bank list public?

No. The FDIC publishes the number of problem banks in its Quarterly Banking Profile, but it does not publish their identities. The underlying CAMELS ratings and examination records are confidential supervisory information.

How often does the FDIC update the problem-bank count?

The count is published quarterly. The latest available figure is measured at the end of the reporting quarter, so it arrives after the date it describes and should not be read as a live count.

How does a bank get on the problem list?

The FDIC says banks on the list have a CAMELS composite rating of 4 or 5. CAMELS covers capital, asset quality, management, earnings, liquidity and sensitivity to market risk.

Does being on the list mean a bank will fail?

No. Banks can leave the list after correcting weaknesses, raising capital, changing management or merging. The public data does not show the eventual outcome for each named institution because the names are confidential.

Where can I find the names of banks that already failed?

The FDIC publishes a separate failed-bank list. It names institutions only after they have been closed and placed into receivership, which is different from the confidential list of open banks receiving the weakest supervisory composite ratings.