Merger Radar: 945 credit unions in the elevated band, Q1 2026

Where the system sits

As of Q1 2026, the panel (our quarterly dataset of credit-union financials) holds 4,336 credit unions. Of those, 945 (21.8% of the system) score in the Elevated or High merger-susceptibility band. Merger susceptibility is a score that sorts credit unions into bands from Low to High. It is not a prediction that a given credit union will merge. It measures how closely a balance sheet matches the pattern seen before past mergers. That pattern is small size, shrinking membership, weak earnings, thin capital and an old charter.

The finding is in the median assets column. Median assets fall at every step from Low to High, so susceptibility is mostly about size. The Elevated and High bands are made up of small credit unions, not ones in distress. Each carries fixed compliance and technology costs spread across too few members.

Concentration by asset tier

Each asset tier is a size bracket, by total assets. Read the last column, not the second. A tier with many credit unions will have many elevated ones just by its size. The share tells you whether the tier is unusual.

Where the pressure is geographically

This table ranks states by the share of their credit unions scoring Elevated or High. Only states with at least 15 credit unions in the panel are included. Smaller states are left out rather than shown with a warning. With nine credit unions, one of them changing band moves the share by eleven points.

What changed this quarter

A change of band is the event worth acting on. A credit union that has sat in Moderate for eight quarters is background. One that crossed into Elevated this quarter did so because something on its balance sheet moved. The score's breakdown names which part moved.

How the score is built

Merger susceptibility is a published scorecard, not a black box. It combines seven parts: size, membership trend, loan trend, earnings, capital, charter age and charge-off rate (loans written off as losses). Capital is measured against the 7% regulatory threshold. Each part is scaled from 0 to 1 and weighted by a documented amount. Every score breaks back down into those parts, and the product shows the breakdown for each credit union.

Separately, a fitted statistical model estimates the chance of a merger within one year. It was tested on later quarters it never saw while it was being fitted. It was scored against real outcomes, not against itself. The outcome is narrow on purpose. It counts only a distress merger: one the regulator attributes to the credit union's own condition. A strategic combination of two healthy credit unions does not count.

Here is how it did. Take one credit union that had a distress merger and one that did not. The model ranked the merging one higher 86 times out of 100 pairs. The top tenth of its list caught roughly 55% of distress mergers. That is about 5.5× what a random list of the same length would catch.

Those results rest on 89 distress mergers, which puts the standard error near 4 pairs in 100. The standard error is roughly how far a measured figure can sit from the true one by chance. The test period also had no distress merger above $500M in assets. Above that size the model is untested rather than weak. It also rarely names a large credit union: 49 of its top 50 names are under $50M. The method and its limits are published in full.

This post reports on the system as a whole. By design, it names no credit union. The counts and distributions here are the free half. The ranked list of named credit unions behind them, ready to export, is what a subscription opens.

Caveats

Every figure above is a model estimate computed from the quarterly panel as of the quarter named at the top of this post. Scores are not investment, credit or merger advice, and nothing here is a recommendation about any institution. The scorecards, their published weights and their known limitations are set out in the disclosures.