A neon sign reading "TOP 10"
For eight years, CU Times has been reporting each quarter on the earnings of the 10 largest credit unions by assets. Although the 10 are a tiny fraction of the number of credit unions, they account for about 20% of the movement’s assets.
The purpose of tracking what we call the “Top 10” has been to get an early glimpse of the overall trends in the credit union movement within days of the reporting deadline – 30 days after the end of the quarter.
The NCUA releases its full datasets about nine weeks after the end of the quarter.
And other reports tend to be wedded to year-to-date presentations, which is how the NCUA releases the data, but not how new trends can be detected.
For example, the latest NCUA Call Reports show income and originations for the six months ending June 30, which means half of the data is old news, being diluted by the first quarter. Dilution increases as the year-to-date grows longer.
CU Times simply subtracts out the old data to show earnings in three-month increments.
Manually entering key data for 10 credit unions into a database form takes time, but is doable for CU Times’ deft 10-digit data team. The queries are updated each quarter for the new dates, and can be easily – or at least relatively easily – exported and pasted into waiting spreadsheets.
All of that said, CU Times expects to be changing its method in the coming quarters to make greater use of Callahan’s Peer Suite, which we have been using for other purposes for the past year or so.
Besides saving time on data entry, the huge advantage of Callahan is that it has methods for consistently updating its database when revised Call Reports are filed. The static “flat files” available from the NCUA are not updated even after major errors are found.
The downside might be a few days of delay in reporting.
Generally, the Top 10 have higher earnings measured by their returns on average assets (ROA).
But the ups and downs of the Top 10 earnings typically are going in the same direction as other credit unions.
The chart above shows the biggest aberration occurred in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Top 10 took highly aggressive and fiscally conservative loan loss provisions in 2020 when the scope of the economic impact was uncertain. In 2020, earnings dipped steeply but other credit unions had slightly higher ROA.
The Top 10 released excess provisions back into earnings in 2021 when it was apparent the economy was weathering the storm, thanks in large part to heavy government subsidies to households. As a result, Top 10 ROA exceeded others’ by 48 basis points.
In the other periods, the Top 10’s ROA exceeded other credit unions by 8 to 28 basis points.
Top 10 credit unions have grown faster than other credit unions in most years, but not by much.
Last year their growth rates differed by only 30 basis points. Top 10 credit unions grew 2.5% and others grew 2.2%.
In 2022, Top 10 assets grew only 3.4%, while others grew 5.5%.
The 2018 average for wages and other compensation was $82,526 per employee among the Top 10 and $74,079 at other credit unions, or 90% of Top 10 pay.
By 2024, the gap had widened, with other credit unions paying their employees 81% of the Top 10 average.
That gap has held through the first half of 2025 with average pay an annualized $128,649 at the Top 10 and $103,658 among other credit unions.
Size is part of the reason, and productivity is another. Assets per full-time-equivalent employee was $8.2 million among the Top 10 on June 30, compared with $6.4 million at other credit unions.
But the difference essentially disappears for the first half when employee expenses are expressed as an annualized percent of average assets.
The ratio was 1.60% for the Top 10 and 1.62% for others.
The makeup of the Top 10 hasn’t changed as much as you might expect.
Seven that were in the lineup for December 2017 were on the list in June. One of the credit unions that dropped off was First Tech Federal Credit Union of San Jose, Calif., which as of June this year had $17.1 billion in assets and 704,343 members.
First Tech is expected to rejoin the list by the end of the year through its proposed acquisition by Digital Federal Credit Union of Marlborough, Mass. Based on June figures, it would have a combined $29.8 billion in assets, which would currently rank it at No. 5, just behind PenFed Credit Union of Tysons, Va.
And Ent Credit Union of Colorado Springs, Colo., would join the list sometime next year when it expects to complete its acquisition of Wings Financial Credit Union of Apple Valley, Minn. Based on June data, it would rank No. 10 with $19.8 billion in assets.
Leaving the Top 10 would be Alliant Credit Union of Chicago ($20 billion in assets, 924,926 members) and Suncoast Credit Union of Tampa, Fla. ($18.9 billion in assets, 1.3 million members).
By the way, in quarterly Top 10 stories, CU Times cranks up the time machine to change past data comparisons to match whatever the current lineup is – the same-store method. However, for charts presented here, the Top 10 figures are completely based on whoever was in the ranking that quarter to reflect the changes in the movement over a longer stretch of time.
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