Why this exists
A while back I was shopping for a mortgage. Somewhere in the middle of that, I found out that a credit union headquartered about eight hundred miles from my house would write me a better loan than anything I could find locally. It wasn't close, either. I'd had no idea that was even possible.
That raised an obvious question: how many others were out there? So I started looking. What I found was that answering it properly meant visiting credit union websites one at a time, finding the page where they published their mortgage rates — if they published them at all — writing down the numbers, and then going back to check whether I was even allowed to join. Membership rules are published separately from rates, in different language at every institution, and some of them run to several paragraphs of who lives, works, worships or attends school where.
I spent hours on this. I got maybe a few dozen institutions deep before realizing I was doing something a computer should be doing, and that nobody had built the thing that does it.
So I built it.
What it does
CU RateFinder checks the publicly advertised mortgage rates at roughly 1,219 credit unions every day, and pairs them with each institution's published membership rules and the states it actually writes mortgages in. You put in a ZIP code and get back the institutions that will plausibly both accept you as a member and lend where you live.
Those are two separate questions, and most of the frustration in my own search came from not realizing that. A credit union that anyone in the country can join is no use to you if it doesn't originate mortgages in your state. Both have to be true.
Who I am
Clay Whitfield is a pen name. I use one because I have a full-time career in a field with nothing to do with lending, and I'd rather this project and my day job stay unconnected. That's the whole reason — there's nothing more interesting behind it.
I want to be straightforward about what I am and am not. I am not a mortgage broker, a loan officer, a financial advisor, or a credit union employee. I hold no licenses. I have never worked in the industry. I'm someone who went looking for a mortgage, got annoyed at how hard the search was, and built a tool to make it less annoying.
That means you shouldn't take anything here as advice. What I can offer instead is transparency about where every number comes from and how much I've checked it, which is what the methodology page is for. Judge the site on that rather than on my credentials, because I don't have any.
How this site makes money
Right now, it doesn't.
There are no ads on this site today. If it ever gets enough traffic to be worth it, I expect to run display advertising through a network like Google AdSense, and I'll say so here when that happens.
What I want to be unambiguous about is what is not happening, now or in any plan I have:
- No credit union pays to appear here. Every institution in the database is included because it publishes its rates, full stop.
- No credit union pays for placement or ranking. Tables sort by rate and APR. There is no promoted slot and no way to buy one.
- No affiliate or referral relationships exist with any institution listed.
- No lead fees. I don't sell your information, and there's nothing to sell — the site doesn't require an account to see rates.
If any of that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it takes effect, not after.
What I'm still working on
The site went live in summer 2026 and is very much a work in progress. I'm currently going through all 1,219 institutions one at a time, building a verified record of which mortgage products each one actually publishes, so that the scraper knows what it should be finding and can flag anything unexpected for me to look at by hand. That's roughly half done.
I've also recorded published lending states directly for 160 institutions. The other 1,059 don't publish that information, so the site infers it from their charter geography — and says so, on every one of their pages, rather than quietly presenting a guess as a fact.
Corrections
If you work at a credit union and something here about your institution is wrong — a rate, a membership rule, the states you lend in — email admin@curatefinder.com and I'll fix it. I'd rather hear from you than have it stay wrong.
Same goes for anyone else who spots an error. This is one person's project, and it will have mistakes in it.
— Clay Whitfield