Your credit union takes in deposits and lends them back out. The loan-to-share ratio measures exactly how much of that deposit money is actually working in loans.
It's one number, and it tells a big story. Are you putting members' money to work, or is it sitting in cash and low-yield investments? Are you lending hard enough to earn, or so hard that a bad month of deposit runoff leaves you scrambling?
That's why examiners watch it. That's why you should too.
What it measures
Loan-to-share tells you what share of your members' deposits you've lent out. Banks talk about loan-to-*deposit*. Credit unions run the same idea, just in our own language: loan-to-*share*, because members hold shares, not accounts.
A high number means most of the deposit base is out working as loans. A low number means a lot of it is parked in cash and investments instead.
The formula
Total loans divided by total shares, times 100. "Shares" means all shares and deposits.
That's it. No adjustments, no seasonal magic. Total loans over total shares.
One cousin to keep straight: loan-to-*assets* (total loans divided by total assets) often runs lower, roughly 60% to 80%, because the denominator is bigger. Same spirit, different bottom of the fraction. This article stays on loan-to-share, the deposit-relative read.
What good looks like: Roughly 70% to 90% is common. There's no bright-line regulatory threshold; it's a balance, and examiners watch where you land.
Red flags: Very high and you're stretched on liquidity and funding, real pressure if shares run off. Very low and money sits idle in cash and low-yield investments instead of working in loans, dragging earnings. Both extremes hurt, just in different ways.
Levers: Loan demand and origination on one side, deposit strategy on the other.
What is a good loan-to-share ratio for a credit union?
Here's the trap: people chase the number instead of the driver.
One snapshot tells you almost nothing. Is 82% good? Depends. On what you lend, on your field of membership, on how your deposits move through the year. A share-draft-heavy CU behaves nothing like an auto-lending shop.
So don't read the number cold. Read it three ways.
Read the trend, not the snapshot. Is loan-to-share drifting up quarter over quarter, or falling off a cliff? Read it against peers your size and lending mix, because "good" lives in that comparison, not in a universal target. And when it's off, fix the driver: soft loan demand, tight underwriting, a deposit surge, whatever's actually moving the fraction. The ratio is the symptom. Go find the cause.
That peer read is the hard part to do alone. You know your own number. You don't have the CU across town lined up next to it.
That's the exact job CU411 does. It puts your loan-to-share beside the Average, Median, Min, and Max for credit unions your size, so "is 82% good?" turns into "here's where 82% sits against your peers." The liquidity read is the "L" in a CAMELS-style screen, and loan-to-share is one of its plainest signals.
This is general education, not regulatory or financial advice. Judge your own ratio against your peers, your mix, and your examiner's context.
Want to see where your loan-to-share actually sits? Pull it on the CU411 FPR Key Ratios report, where it lands right next to your peer group, or start on the CU411 tools page and poke a real profile like Navy Federal.
For the bigger picture, learn how to read your NCUA FPR and how liquidity fits the CAMELS-style risk screen. Then read across to two ratios that move with this one: what's a good delinquency ratio and what's a good efficiency ratio.