BankingLENS

Banking glossary

What are noninterest-bearing deposits?

Figures from FFIEC call reports for the quarter ending June 30, 2026. Published September 20, 2026.

Noninterest-bearing deposits: Noninterest-bearing deposits are balances a bank pays nothing on, mostly business operating accounts.

How it is calculated

Reported on Schedule RC as noninterest bearing deposits in domestic offices. BankingLens shows them as a share of total deposits.

Formula

Noninterest-bearing share = noninterest-bearing deposits / total deposits

What banks reported in Q2 2026

Across every bank that filed for Q2 2026, the median noninterest-bearing share of deposits was 20.98%, with the middle half between 15.03% and 27.73%. The right comparison is almost always the row for the bank’s own size rather than the industry line.

Bank size (total assets) Bottom quartile Median Top quartile
Under $100M 15.62% 23.11% 30.29%
$100M - $300M 15.28% 21.63% 28.15%
$300M - $1B 15.08% 20.55% 27.20%
$1B - $3B 14.18% 19.52% 25.77%
$3B - $10B 15.04% 20.12% 27.79%
$10B - $100B 15.90% 23.17% 28.37%
Over $100B 0.78% 20.26% 25.52%

Source: BankingLens, computed from FFIEC call reports for the quarter ending June 30, 2026. Quartiles are calculated across the full population of filing banks in each size band, not sampled. Non-insured non-deposit trust companies are left out of every statistic: they take no deposits and make no loans, so a margin or a funding cost computed for them has no meaning.

How to read it

This single line explains most of the difference between a cheap bank and an expensive one. Operating accounts, escrow, payroll, title and trust balances sit still because they are there to be used rather than to earn a rate, and a bank with a lot of them funds itself at a fraction of what its neighbor pays.

The common mistake. Assuming the share is stable. It fell hard across the industry after 2022 as depositors moved idle balances into accounts that pay, so a bank’s own direction matters more than where it sits today.

Go deeper

See also. Core deposits, Cost of deposits, Deposit beta, Net interest spread.

Every figure on this page is computed from FFIEC call reports for the quarter ending June 30, 2026 and is not modeled, estimated or sampled. This page is generated by _tools/seo/build_glossary.mjs and carries no figure that was typed in. See our methodology and disclaimer. Definitions are general guidance, not regulatory or investment advice.

Knowing the definition is the easy half.

The hard half is whether a given bank’s number is good for the peer group it is actually measured in. That is what the scorecard does, for every bank that files a call report, updated with every FFIEC release.

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