List of banks in the US: how many there are by size and state, and how to download the FDIC list

This guide is for companies that sell to banks: software and fintech vendors, cybersecurity and managed IT providers, compliance and audit firms, marketing agencies, branch design, security and facilities companies. It's also for anyone who just needs a current US bank list. It covers how many banks there are by type, size and state, the largest banks, how to download the official list, how banks buy, and a worked example.

How many banks there are in the US

The FDIC insures and lists every US bank and savings institution. Its BankFind data, refreshed on 23 October 2026 with balance sheets as of 30 June 2026, shows:

The number keeps falling, mostly through mergers. The FDIC's Quarterly Banking Profile was based on 4,238 insured banks and savings institutions for June 2026, 34 more than BankFind's active list four months later. Credit unions are a separate list kept by the NCUA, which counted 4,214 in June 2026, down from 4,370 a year earlier.

Branches are a much bigger number. BankFind's records show 76,306 domestic offices for these 4,204 institutions, and the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns counted 82,989 commercial banking establishments with paid employees in 2023 (it counts every location with staff, including operations centers).

Banks by asset size

Two new banks hadn't yet reported assets and aren't in the size bands.

This is the most important table on the page for a seller. There are 3,168 banks under $1 billion: plenty of accounts, each with a small budget and a short chain of decision makers. There are 156 banks over $10 billion: few accounts, most of the money, and long procurement cycles.

The largest banks in the US

Ranked by total assets of the bank itself (not the holding company), as of 30 June 2026:

The four largest hold 40% of all US bank assets. The main office in BankFind is the charter address, which isn't always where decisions are made: Citibank and Wells Fargo Bank both list Sioux Falls, South Dakota, while their parent companies are run from elsewhere.

Banks by state

Small banks dominate the Midwest and the Plains, and 912 banks nationwide are classed by the FDIC as agricultural specialists. Rhode Island and Alaska have five banks each, Hawaii six.

How to download a list of banks from BankFind

1. Open BankFind Suite on the FDIC's site and choose the institution search.
2. Filter. Pick active institutions, then state, total assets, charter class or primary regulator.
3. Choose the fields. Name, FDIC certificate number, city and state, total assets, deposits, number of offices, holding company, website and specialization group are the most useful for prospecting.
4. Export the results to CSV.
5. Refresh quarterly. Financial data updates after each quarter's Call Reports, and mergers remove banks every month.

The same data is available through the FDIC's free API, which is easier if you want to refresh the list automatically:

https://api.fdic.gov/banks/institutions?filters=ACTIVE:1 AND STALP:MO AND ASSET:[250000 TO 2000000]&fields=NAME,CERT,CITY,STALP,ASSET,DEP,OFFDOM,BKCLASS,REGAGNT,NAMEHCR,WEBADDR&limit=1000&format=csv

(ASSET is in thousands of dollars. Replace MO with any state code.)

For branch-level detail, the FDIC's Summary of Deposits reports deposits for every branch as of 30 June each year, which shows where each bank is growing and its share of a local market.

How banks buy

Banks buy like regulated companies, because they are. Three things shape every sale:

• Third-party risk management. The Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC issued joint guidance in June 2023 that applies to every bank with third-party relationships, scaled to the risk of the activity. It sets out a life cycle of planning, due diligence and third-party selection, contract negotiation, ongoing monitoring, and termination. Due diligence can cover your strategy, legal and regulatory compliance, financial condition, business experience, key personnel, risk management, information security, systems, operational resilience, incident reporting, physical security and subcontractors. The board has ultimate responsibility for oversight. Have a due diligence package (financials, SOC 2 report, security policies, insurance, business continuity plan) ready before the first call.
• Exams. Federal law requires a full-scope, on-site exam at least every 12 months, or every 18 months for well-capitalized, well-rated banks under $6 billion in assets (raised from $3 billion in 2026). Exam findings create deadlines, and deadlines create budgets for compliance, security and IT.
• The core processor. Most banks run on a core system from a small number of providers, and anything that touches customer data has to integrate with it. A core contract renewal or conversion is one of the biggest buying windows a bank has.

Segmenting a bank list

• Size. Use the asset bands above; they predict budget, team size and process better than anything else.
• Regulator. 2,634 banks are supervised by the FDIC, 872 by the OCC and 698 by the Federal Reserve. Compliance and audit vendors often tailor their pitch to the regulator's exam priorities.
• Specialization. The FDIC tags each bank: 2,371 are commercial lending specialists, 912 agricultural, 308 mortgage, 31 consumer and 9 credit card.
• Holding company. 3,536 of the 4,204 belong to a holding company. Sell to the holding company when it runs shared services for several banks.
• Change. Asset growth from one quarter to the next, a merger announcement, a new branch, a new CEO or a core conversion.

Worked example: managed security for community banks

Illustrative example. The company and its plan are fictional; the counts come from FDIC BankFind on 23 October 2026.

The seller: Ridgeline Managed IT (ridgeline.example) runs security monitoring for community banks and wants to grow in its home region. The target: banks in Missouri and Kansas with $250 million to $2 billion in assets, big enough to need outside monitoring but too small for a large in-house security team.

What the data shows. 162 banks fit: 90 in Missouri and 72 in Kansas. 148 are state-chartered; the FDIC supervises 113, the Federal Reserve 35 and the OCC 14. 156 belong to a holding company, all 162 list a website, and together they run 1,265 domestic offices. 61 are agricultural specialists, which matters for the angle: their branches are spread across rural counties.

The arithmetic. If an illustrative 30% have a named IT or information security officer you can identify, that's about 49 contacts. Add the CEO for the rest and you have a list of 162. At an illustrative 6% reply rate, a first wave gives about 10 conversations, and every bank on the list faces an exam on a predictable cycle. Finding the IT officer and the right angle for each bank is the slow part; Bebop researches each account in a list and writes a playbook for it.

Subject: Monitoring [number] branches before your next exam

Hi [first name],

[Bank] runs [number] offices across [region], which means [number] networks to watch around the clock.

Banks your size tell us the hard part isn't the tools, it's having someone review alerts at 2am and documenting it the way examiners expect.

We monitor security for [number] community banks in Missouri and Kansas, and our due diligence package (SOC 2 report, financials, insurance) is ready to send. Would a 20-minute call before your next IT exam be useful?

[Your name]
[Phone number]

Common mistakes

• Using an undated directory. Banks merge every month; work from the current BankFind list.
• Treating the charter address as headquarters. Check where the executives actually sit.
• Ignoring due diligence until late. A missing SOC 2 report can stall a deal for months.
• Pitching a $10 billion process to a $300 million bank. Match the offer and the paperwork to the size.
• Forgetting the core. Ask early how your product connects to the bank's core system.

Next step: write down the bank sizes, regions and specializations you sell to with the ideal customer profile template, then pull the matching banks from BankFind.