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PPP Lenders by Estimated Processing Fees

What the Paycheck Protection Program paid lenders to originate it — modeled loan by loan from SBA's published fee schedule, because SBA never published what each lender was actually paid.

How this list is built

SBA paid a processing fee on every PPP loan, set by a published schedule: a percentage that varied with the size of the loan and changed between the 2020 and 2021 rules. SBA has not published the fees it paid each lender, so this list models them: for every loan in the SBA FOIA release, the fee schedule for that loan's vintage and size band is applied to the approved amount, and the results are summed by originating lender.

Unit ranked: the originating lender, which is an SBA field in the loan file. Metric: modeled processing fee in dollars. Universe: 4,688 originating lenders, $38.24B of estimated fees on 11,468,206 loans; the 25 below account for $16.20B, 42.4 percent. The release holds 11,468,210 loans: the four whose undisbursed amount equals or exceeds the approved amount are dropped, and nothing else is. Vintage: SBA PPP FOIA release of 30 September 2024; fees recalculated from the loan file on 19 September 2026.

The 25 largest by modeled fee

The two rows without a rank are platform networks, not lenders. Womply and Blueacorn originated no PPP loan and are not in SBA's originating-lender field. Its loans were made by the partner lenders listed in this table and are already counted in those lenders' rows. The Blueacorn row is the whole PPP book of its partner lenders, including loans those lenders may have made without the platform, so it is an upper bound on platform-sourced volume, not a measured count of platform originations, and its fee figure is the sum of those lenders' modeled fees under SBA's schedule, not platform revenue: the share each platform received was set by private agreements that are not in the data. The Womply row gives this archive's Womply loan count, built from court records for three lenders and the 2021 loans of four others (how it is counted); Fountainhead's dollar figure is its 2021 SBA approvals, since its petition states only a loan count. It carries no fee estimate. Womply's own funded-loan count is over 1.3 million, from the House Select Subcommittee's December 2022 staff report, held in this archive. Neither row is counted in the 25 rows or in the share they account for.

#Originating lenderLoansDollars approvedEstimated feesFee per loan
—Womply (aggregator network)
Platform network — not a lender
more than 1,293,4281more than $19.74B——
1 Womply loan count: court records for three lenders, 2021 loans for four; no fee estimate is made for it
—Blueacorn (aggregator network)
Platform network — not a lender
840,139$13.06B$1,992,400,320$2,372
1JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association452,892$44.11B$1,790,545,416$3,954
2Bank of America, National Association491,034$34.41B$1,491,130,978$3,037
3Prestamos CDFI, LLC444,780$6.85B$1,055,074,366$2,372
4Cross River Bank478,866$12.89B$1,034,617,269$2,161
5Harvest Small Business Finance, LLC408,173$8.19B$1,002,631,927$2,456
6Capital Plus Financial, LLC395,359$6.21B$937,325,954$2,371
7Benworth Capital311,022$4.22B$697,409,428$2,242
8Wells Fargo Bank, National Association280,717$13.78B$690,064,427$2,458
9Fountainhead SBF LLC272,227$4.13B$640,621,923$2,353
10PNC Bank, National Association119,352$17.32B$606,847,472$5,085
11Truist Bank117,956$16.21B$588,456,509$4,989
12Customers Bank249,661$6.33B$558,205,641$2,236
13BSD Capital, LLC dba Lendistry206,724$4.00B$521,082,199$2,521
14U.S. Bank, National Association174,822$10.81B$506,938,701$2,900
15TD Bank, National Association133,140$12.27B$497,913,518$3,740
16Manufacturers and Traders Trust Company90,029$13.31B$475,238,638$5,279
17Itria Ventures LLC172,831$4.87B$473,404,806$2,739
18The Huntington National Bank83,184$11.10B$400,968,338$4,820
19KeyBank National Association69,405$11.12B$379,294,736$5,465
20Zions Bank, a division of Zions Bancorporation, National Association76,531$9.88B$361,360,047$4,722
21BMO Bank National Association65,941$10.35B$349,817,168$5,305
22Readycap Lending, LLC106,252$4.78B$307,457,261$2,894
23Citizens Bank, National Association85,677$7.01B$293,168,801$3,422
24Fifth Third Bank65,935$7.36B$272,745,955$4,137
25Regions Bank78,547$6.42B$268,451,148$3,418

Four of the rows include PPP loans made by banks that later became part of the listed lender, because SBA's file shows those loans under the later name: JPMorgan Chase (14,327 loans, $2.56 billion, made by First Republic Bank, which failed and was acquired on May 1, 2023), Manufacturers and Traders Trust (30,935 loans, $3.68 billion, made by People's United Bank, merged April 2, 2022), Huntington (24,419 loans, $2.60 billion, made by TCF National Bank, merged June 9, 2021) and BMO (29,703 loans, $4.24 billion, made by Bank of the West, merged February 2, 2023). The table keeps SBA's lender field as published; each lender page has the detail (FDIC BankFind records).

What this measures, and what it does not

These are estimates, not payments. Every figure is the published schedule applied to a published loan amount. SBA has not released per-lender fee payments, so nothing here can be reconciled against what was actually paid. The model prices every loan in the release, including the 643,039 that SBA records as charged off; there is no cancellation filter. Fees clawed back after they were paid, and any netting or offset, are outside the model.

The fee schedule rewards volume at the small end: the percentage is highest on the smallest loans, so a lender that made hundreds of thousands of very small loans can out-earn a bank that lent far more money. The fee-per-loan column shows that difference directly.

The lender ranked is the originating lender named in SBA's file. Where a technology firm sourced and processed loans that a partner bank originated, the fee is modeled against the bank in whose name the loan was made, and the split between them is not in any public file. Lenders are ranked by modeled fee. The schedule is applied to the approved amount, not to what was disbursed or forgiven.

Sources

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