The 2024 U.S. Census flat file, used to create the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Aggregate and Disclosure reports, was released Friday by the umbrella group of federal financial institution regulators.
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) says its census flat files are a convenient method of accessing and analyzing the FFIEC census data that are used to create the HMDA and CRA reports. The files contain more than 1,000 fields of census data and are updated annually, the council said, to reflect changes to metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and metropolitan division (MD) boundaries announced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and CRA distressed/underserved census tracts as announced by the federal banking regulatory agencies.
“For years prior to 2019, these files are also included as part of a Windows application,” the FFIEC noted in its announcement. “The Windows application allows users to generate reports that can be exported in Excel, PDF, and text formats. From 2019 on, the user must download the flat files to generate their own reports.”