The 90 Million Myth

What is the true number of credit union members in the United States?

NCUA reported that federally-insured credit unions had 90 million members. This number is arrived at by aggregating the total number of members of each credit union.

However, this number appears to be an overestimate.

The Credit Union Journal on January 24, 2008 reported that Jerry Marsh, a credit union consultant, said the actual number of credit union members is closer to 30 million, because “the so-called memberships that credit unions count represent duplicates, people who have memberships in two or three or more credit unions.”

Jerry Marsh’s estimate may be at the lower end of the range; but could accurately reflect the number of individuals that identify a credit union as their primary financial institution.

Using data from a 2004 Filene Study, Who Uses Credit Unions?, that found that 36 percent of households use credit unions – 8 percent of households only use a credit union, 12 percent primarily use a credit union, and 16 percent use a credit union, but their primary relationship is with a bank – then this would equate to about 42 million households using a credit union.

I suspect that the average number of household members using a credit union is below 2, maybe something between 1.25 and 1.5 household members. But this is strictly a guess, as I have not seen such a statistic.

This would suggest that the true number of credit union members is more likely in the range between 50 million and 60 million, not the 90 million reported by NCUA.