Member-Owned Money

In three decades the movement lost more than half its institutions and more than doubled its members. Small charters did not close so much as fold into larger ones: fewer doors, and behind each surviving door far more people and far more money. Read the three panels together - they share a year axis, each keeps its own scale.

institutions (count) members & assets (growing)

Institutions in charcoal, members and assets in member-teal. The count line slopes down while both of the others climb - the single clearest picture of consolidation: 63% fewer credit unions holding 8x the assets. Illustrative trajectory; real shape needs a loop over the NCUA quarterly archive.

Spread the same money and members across ever fewer institutions and the typical credit union swells. Indexed to its 1994 self, the average charter now carries roughly 21x the assets and 5.8x the members it once did. Indexing both to a shared baseline lets one scale hold both lines honestly.

Average per surviving credit union, 1994 = 100

assets per credit union members per credit union

Loyalty to the movement is intensely regional. In a handful of states more than three in four residents carry a membership - the legacy of company towns and statewide charters that quietly became the default place to bank. A few hours' drive away, it barely registers. Penetration counts memberships against population, so a state anchored by one dominant charter can brush past 100% as people who belong to two are counted twice.

The map's colors, counted. Most states cluster in the 30.000000000000004-40% range - a credit union for a solid minority of residents - while a short, bright tail runs past 75% in the strongholds. Nationally, memberships equal about 38% of population, inflated by people who belong to more than one.

Number of states per 10-point penetration band

under 25% 25 - 40% 40 - 55% 55 - 75% 75%+

Consolidation has a face, and it wears a uniform. A single institution - Navy Federal, chartered for the military - now holds more assets than the smallest several thousand credit unions combined. These sixteen names carry an outsized share of the movement's money while thousands of community charters divide the rest. Bars share one scale; the tip value is the real figure.

Total members across these 16: 32,960,000

Two ways to be big. Some giants run dense branch networks; others serve nearly as many people through an app and a call center. Alliant CU carries about 850,000 members per branch - it operates barely a single storefront - while community charters keep a branch for every few thousand. The axis is logarithmic; each gridline is a multiple, not an increment.

Members per branch, sixteen largest credit unions (log scale)

The movement is profoundly bimodal. The 1% of credit unions above $10B hold 32% of all assets; the 3,330 smallest charters - 73% of institutions - split barely 9% between them. The further the curve sags below the grey line of perfect equality, the more the money pools at the top.

With no shareholders to pay, a credit union returns its margin to members as better rates - higher on what you save, lower on what you borrow. Across the board the spread runs the members' way. An estimated $22.4B flows back annually, roughly $156 per member household. Teal is the movement; clay is the banks.

Bars within each panel share one scale, so a longer teal bar in the earn panel and a shorter teal bar in the pay panel both mean the same thing: the member comes out ahead. These are blended credit-union-vs-bank averages, not a single call-report field - illustrative stand-ins pending a real NCUA and bank-survey ingest.

Every credit union is chartered around a defined field of membership - the community it is licensed to serve. The federal / state charter line splits the movement almost evenly by money but not by count, more than half of all charters carry a low-income designation, and a meaningful slice are certified to reach places the banks left behind.

Federal vs state charter, across three measures

Federal charter (FCU) State charter (FISCU)

Field-of-membership mix (share of institutions)

Community (geographic) · 52%Occupational / associational · 44%Multiple / other common bond · 4%

Federal charters outnumber state ones, but the two are near-even on assets - the biggest state charters are very large. More than half of all institutions carry a low-income designation even as the giants dominate the balance sheet: the cooperative mandate and the scale reality share the same movement. Illustrative.

Tool Compare two credit unions → Put any two of the sixteen largest side by side on assets, members, branches, and members served per branch.