The "average" US bank has about a quarter of its deposits uninsured — but the industry-wide share is nearly double that because uninsured deposits are concentrated at the largest banks

Summary

It depends heavily on what "average" means, and the two readings differ by nearly a factor of two. At the typical (median) FDIC-insured bank, about 24-26% of deposits sit above the $250,000 insurance limit as of Q4 2025 — most community and regional banks. But the industry-wide, dollar-weighted share — the number FDIC itself reports each quarter and the one financial press usually cites — is nearly 45% uninsured, almost double the typical bank's figure. The gap exists because uninsured deposits are heavily concentrated at a small number of very large banks: the 10 largest banks by deposits hold 51.5% of the industry's total deposits but 60.1% of its uninsured deposits. Yes, the share has been rising recently: the industry-wide ratio bottomed around 40-42% in mid-2024 (after the March 2023 regional-bank crisis and post-pandemic stimulus wind-down) and has climbed roughly 2-3 percentage points since, reaching about 43-45% by Q4 2025 — though still below the post-pandemic peak of roughly 47-49% seen in late 2021. The typical bank's own uninsured share has moved much less over the same period, confirming that the recent rise is a large-bank phenomenon, not a broad-based one.

Why "average" needs to be defined

This is not a small nuance — it changes the headline answer. A simple, unweighted average or median across all ~4,350 FDIC-insured institutions describes the experience of a typical bank (mostly small community banks, since there are thousands of them). A deposit-weighted aggregate describes the experience of the typical dollar of deposits, and is dominated by a handful of megabanks that hold the majority of all deposits in the system. Using FDIC's own per-institution Call Report data (the ESTINS field — each bank's own estimate of what share of its deposits is FDIC-insured) for Q4 2025:

• Median bank: 75.5% insured / 24.5% uninsured
• Simple (unweighted) average across banks: 73.5% insured / 26.5% uninsured
• Deposit-weighted industry aggregate: 55.1% insured / 44.9% uninsured (FDIC's own published Q4 2025 Quarterly Banking Profile figure, computed on a narrower domestic-deposit basis, is 43.3%)

Only about 5.8% of individual banks have MORE than half their own deposits uninsured — but those banks (overwhelmingly the largest ones) hold such a large share of total industry deposits that they pull the dollar-weighted average far above what a randomly chosen bank looks like.

Has the share been rising? The trend, computed quarter by quarter

Using the same per-bank FDIC Call Report data across eight quarters from Q4 2019 through Q4 2025:

The pattern: uninsured deposits surged during 2020-2021 as pandemic stimulus flooded bank accounts and rates were near zero (less incentive to shop for yield or split deposits). The ratio fell sharply after the March 2023 regional-bank crisis, as depositors and banks both took steps to reduce uninsured concentrations, bottoming around mid-2024. Since then it has been gradually rising again — FDIC's own Q4 2025 Quarterly Banking Profile explicitly attributes recent deposit growth to "higher uninsured deposits" in multiple consecutive quarters (Q4 2024, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, and Q4 2025 releases all cite estimated uninsured deposit growth as the primary driver of the quarter's deposit increase). Notably, the typical/median bank's own ratio has stayed comparatively flat (roughly 25-27% across the whole period) — confirming the St. Louis Fed's own finding that "the nation's largest banks account for most of" the recent increase, not the banking system broadly.

Data and methodology notes

This corpus's own banking.financials table (sourced from the same FDIC BankFind API) does not currently carry the ESTINS (estimated-insured-deposits) field, so this analysis fetched it directly from FDIC's public BankFind Suite API (api.fdic.gov/banks/financials) for all ~4,300-5,200 reporting institutions in each of 8 quarters, and computed both a simple/median per-bank statistic and a deposit-weighted aggregate from the raw per-institution figures. The computed deposit-weighted figures run 1-4 percentage points above FDIC's own officially published Quarterly Banking Profile ratio (43.3% for Q4 2025 per the St. Louis Fed's summary of that release) — likely because FDIC's own published ratio is scoped to domestic-office deposits only, while this analysis used each institution's total reported deposits (DEP), which can include foreign-office deposits at a handful of large multinational banks. The trend direction and approximate magnitude match closely across both calculations, so the qualitative finding (share fell through 2023-2024, has been rising since) is well supported by independent computation, not just cited from a secondary source.