What Is a Call Report? Forms, Filing, and Penalties

A Call Report is the quarterly Consolidated Report of Condition and Income that every national bank, state member bank, insured state nonmember bank, and savings association in the United States must file with its federal regulator. It gives the FDIC, the OCC, and the Federal Reserve a standardized snapshot of the institution’s balance sheet, income, capital, and loan quality, and nearly all of it becomes public within weeks of filing.

Who Has to File

The filing duty is written into federal statute. National banks report under 12 U.S.C. § 161, which requires reports of condition to the Comptroller of the Currency.¹ Insured state nonmember banks report under 12 U.S.C. § 1817, which mandates four reports each year on dates set jointly by the FDIC, the OCC, and the Federal Reserve Board.² State member banks and savings associations face the same quarterly requirement.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council coordinates the format across all three regulators so that every institution files on the same template regardless of its charter.³ That common format is what lets regulators, analysts, and the public compare one bank against another.

Which Form a Bank Files

There are three versions of the Call Report, and the right one depends on the bank’s size and whether it operates outside the United States.

FFIEC 031 is required for any bank with at least one foreign office, and for domestic-only banks with $100 billion or more in total consolidated assets. It is the most detailed version.³
FFIEC 041 is filed by domestic-only banks with total consolidated assets under $100 billion that do not qualify for the streamlined 051.³
FFIEC 051 is a streamlined form available to domestic-only banks with total assets under $5 billion, provided they are not advanced approaches institutions, not subject to Category III capital standards, and not designated as large or highly complex for deposit insurance assessment purposes.⁴

A bank that meets the 051 size threshold can still be moved up to the 041 if its primary federal regulator finds it is significantly engaged in complex activities such as derivatives trading, mortgage banking, securitization, or heavy use of the fair value option.⁵ Total assets are measured as of June 30 each year to set 051 eligibility for the following year’s reports beginning in March, and banks are expected to file the same form for every quarter within a calendar year.⁶

What Goes Inside the Report

The Call Report pulls data from across the general ledger. Its two core pieces are the Report of Condition and the Report of Income, supported by dozens of schedules.

Balance Sheet and Income Statement

Schedule RC is the balance sheet, reporting total assets, total liabilities, and equity capital as of the quarter-end date. Schedule RI is the income statement, reporting total interest income, total interest expense, net interest income, and noninterest income for the calendar year to date.⁴ Supporting schedules break loans and leases into categories by risk and collateral, detail deposit liabilities by account type, and report reserves for expected credit losses.

Regulatory Capital

Schedule RC-R is where regulators look first when assessing solvency. It requires four ratios, each rounded to four decimal places: common equity tier 1, tier 1, total capital, and leverage. Smaller banks that qualify can opt into the Community Bank Leverage Ratio framework, which replaces the full risk-based calculations with a single leverage test.⁷ These capital figures, more than anything else in the report, show whether a bank has enough cushion to absorb losses.

Who Signs the Report

The Call Report is not just a data file; it carries personal legal accountability. The bank’s chief financial officer, or whoever performs that role, must sign a declaration on the cover page attesting that the report is true and correct.³ The report must also be attested separately by board directors who did not sign the CFO declaration. National banks, state member banks, and savings associations need at least three attesting directors. State nonmember banks need at least two.²

Electronic signatures are permitted as long as the process handles signer authentication, intent to sign, association of the signature with the full report, and data integrity.³

How and When the Report Is Filed

Banks submit electronically through the FFIEC’s Central Data Repository, either through its web interface or via web services. The report is prepared in the bank’s own software or a vendor package and then uploaded to the CDR.⁸

The standard deadline is 30 calendar days after the end of each calendar quarter. For 2026, that means April 30, July 30, October 30, and January 30, 2027. Banks with more than one foreign office, other than shell branches or International Banking Facilities, get five additional calendar days to consolidate their international data.⁹

When the CDR receives a submission, it runs three categories of automated checks. Validity edits catch mathematical and formatting errors. Quality edits flag figures that look unusual compared to the bank’s history or peers. Reportability edits catch required data fields the bank left blank.¹⁰

A report that passes all edits is accepted. A report that fails quality edits but includes written explanations is accepted with a note that an analyst needs to review the explanations. A report that fails validity edits, reportability edits, or quality edits without explanations is rejected outright, and the bank gets a notification listing every failed edit in plain English with the values that triggered the failure.¹⁰ The bank’s primary federal regulator then conducts a deeper review to check alignment with prior filings and industry patterns.

Penalties for Late or Inaccurate Filings

The FDIC’s enforcement regulations set a tiered civil money penalty structure. Tier one covers routine late filings. Tier two applies to more serious or repeated late filings. Tier three targets false or misleading reports and can reach up to one percent of the institution’s total assets per day. The maximum dollar amounts at each tier are adjusted for inflation each year, with the FDIC publishing updated figures in the Federal Register by January 15.¹¹ For a large bank, the tier three formula alone can produce daily penalties well into seven figures, which is why Call Report accuracy gets serious attention at the board level.

Correcting a Filed Report

Finding an error after submission does not close the file. If a bank identifies a significant mistake in a previously filed Call Report, it should contact its primary federal regulator about an amended filing.³ The regulator can also require an amendment on its own if it decides items were misclassified or that its reading of the instructions differs from the bank’s.

The trigger for a mandatory amendment is materiality. Following the FASB definition, the FFIEC treats information as material if omitting or misstating it could influence the decisions of someone relying on the report.¹² Because that standard is judgment-based, the decision sits with the supervisory agency rather than a fixed dollar cutoff.

Banks must keep a signed copy of every filed Call Report, along with any amendments and all supporting workpapers, for at least three years after the report date. State law may require longer.³

What Is Public and What Is Confidential

Almost everything in a Call Report is public. A narrow set of line items is withheld, mostly deposit insurance assessment data that could reveal proprietary risk metrics, including certain items on Schedule RI-E and assessment-related memorandum items on Schedule RC-O dealing with probability-of-default calculations for mortgage and consumer loans.³ A bank can ask its primary federal regulator to keep specific additional data confidential if it believes disclosure would cause competitive harm, but disclosure is the default. Most of the report ends up in publicly searchable databases within weeks of filing.

How to Look Up a Bank’s Call Report

There are three main ways to access the public data, each suited to a different depth of analysis.

The FDIC’s BankFind Suite is the simplest starting point. You can search by bank name, FDIC certificate number, or web address to pull up individual institution data, including financial reports and historical information.¹³
The FFIEC Central Data Repository offers individual reports, bulk downloads, and web services for pulling data programmatically across many institutions at once.¹⁴
The Uniform Bank Performance Report converts raw Call Report data into analytical ratios covering earnings, liquidity, capital adequacy, and asset management, and lets you compare a bank against peer group averages, state averages, and custom peer groups.¹⁵

If you are sizing up a bank as a depositor or investor, the UBPR is usually the most useful of the three. The raw schedules are dense, and the UBPR does the peer comparison work for you, showing whether capital ratios, loan quality, and profitability sit above or below other banks of similar size and type.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 161 – Reports to Comptroller of the Currency
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 1817 – Assessments
3
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. FFIEC 031 and FFIEC 041 Consolidated Reports of Condition and Income Instructions
4
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. FFIEC 051 Call Report Instructions
5
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. FFIEC 051 General Instructions
6
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. FFIEC 031 Draft Instructions for Call Report Revisions
7
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. FFIEC 041 Call Report Instructions
8
Central Data Repository. FI User Guide – Submission Flow
9
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Consolidated Reports of Condition and Income for Fourth Quarter
10
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Managing Call Reports
11
eCFR. 12 CFR 308.132 – Assessment of Civil Money Penalties for Violations of 12 USC 1464(v) and 12 USC 1817(a)
12
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. FFIEC 031 and 041 General Instructions
13
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. BankFind Suite – Find Insured Banks
14
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. FFIEC Central Data Repository
15
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Uniform Bank Performance Report