BankingLENS

Banking glossary

What is yield on earning assets?

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

Yield on earning assets: Yield on earning assets is the rate a bank earns on everything it has put to work.

How it is calculated

Annualized total interest income divided by average earning assets, which is the same denominator net interest margin uses.

Formula

Yield on earning assets = annualized total interest income / average earning assets

What banks reported in Q2 2026

Across every bank that filed for Q2 2026, the median yield on earning assets was 5.52%, with the middle half between 5.02% and 6.09%. 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 4.71% 5.26% 6.00%
$100M - $300M 5.02% 5.56% 6.13%
$300M - $1B 5.11% 5.61% 6.13%
$1B - $3B 5.13% 5.53% 6.01%
$3B - $10B 5.06% 5.49% 5.89%
$10B - $100B 4.99% 5.32% 5.71%
Over $100B 4.67% 5.03% 5.48%

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 is the asset half of the spread, and it moves with the loan mix far more than with rates. A bank holding consumer and card paper earns multiples of one holding municipal securities and residential mortgages, in the same quarter, under the same curve.

The common mistake. Reading a high yield as a good result on its own. Yield is priced for risk, so an unusually high number is a statement about the credit being taken, and the nonaccrual and charge off lines are where that statement gets tested.

Go deeper

See also. Earning assets, Net interest margin, Net interest spread, Nonaccrual.

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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