Average Borrower Income

The average is reported over a window of up to three years ending in the most recent published activity year. Incomes are reported in nominal dollars of the year of the loan and are not adjusted for inflation, so a multi-year average blends dollars of different years.

The figure is not household income for the tract, and it is not comparable to the American Community Survey's income estimates. It covers only people who took out a purchase mortgage, which excludes existing residents, renters, cash buyers, and anyone who did not move. Because mortgage borrowers are on average higher-income than the population, the figure generally sits above resident income.

The income reported is the income the lender relied on, which is not necessarily total household income. Where a borrower's income was not the basis of the decision, or a credit decision was not made, the field can be absent.

The register also caps precision in ways the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau imposed to protect privacy: incomes are integers in thousands, and the fields that would let a reader reconstruct an individual household — dates, addresses, credit scores — are among the 27 redacted from the public file (Using MLAR Data).

The tract is the tract of the property, not of the borrower's previous address. Coverage follows institutions above the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act's reporting thresholds, and the published file is revised as institutions resubmit; see the source page.