Safe Rate grades lenders on five dimensions — the 5 P's — built from public HMDA data covering virtually every U.S. mortgage application, plus real response times measured through Safe Rate. Every score runs 0–100.
Four dimensions come straight from HMDA and exist for every lender. The fifth, Promptness, is behavioral — it appears only once a real shopper has asked a lender for a quote.
Rate and upfront fees together, measured against what each loan should have cost given its size, LTV, borrower profile, and market conditions, so we reward genuine value, not lenders who simply serve lower-risk borrowers.
How reliably a lender carries an application to a definitive outcome (a closed loan or a clear answer), adjusted for borrower characteristics. High pull-through means fewer reasons to start over somewhere else.
Real presence and focus in a given market, not just national volume. We log-scale volume so mega-lenders don't drown out the regional banks and credit unions that dominate locally.
Demonstrated expertise by loan type (FHA, VA, USDA, conventional, jumbo) and by purpose, blending best-market performance with national volume so specialists and giants are both ranked fairly.
Every lender, broker, and loan officer is expected to answer a shopper's quote request within one business day. We track responses to real requests sent through Safe Rate, credit those who reply fast, and let silence pull down the overall ranking.
The four HMDA dimensions combine as a simple equal-weight average — each contributes the same share — for a transparent raw score. Promptness then blends in for lenders who've been asked, its weight ramping up as more requests accumulate.
Each product score blends a lender's best local-market performance with its national volume, so specialists with strong regional presence and high-volume giants are both scored fairly.
Standard loans not backed by a government program.
Government-insured loans with lower down-payment requirements.
Loans for veterans and active military.
Rural-housing loans.
Loans exceeding conforming limits.
Loans for buying a home.
Loans that replace an existing mortgage.
Purpose scores mirror product scores, using the same balanced blend of best-market performance and volume.
Every dimension lands a lender in one of five tiers — the same scale you'll see on lender pages.
A few things to keep in mind
We score a lender's first reply to each real request in business days (weekends and U.S. federal holidays excluded). Any genuine response — a quote or a clear 'we can't quote this' — earns full speed credit; only silence scores zero.
A lender's promptness is the recency-weighted average of these per-request scores. Whether a lender could ultimately quote is tracked separately as a quote rate and does not affect promptness.
The four core dimensions are calculated from Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, a public dataset covering virtually all U.S. mortgage applications — which keeps our scoring transparent and comprehensive. Promptness is the one exception: it's measured from real shopper quote requests delivered through Safe Rate, not from HMDA.