How We Evaluate Reverse Mortgage Companies

1. What we evaluate

We evaluate companies that originate reverse mortgages for U.S. homeowners, not individual loan officers, branches or brokers. Every evaluation is built from the same canonical record for each company, so a fact appears in one place and flows to every page that uses it.

Only fields that have been checked against an approved source are eligible to influence a score. Anything unverified is shown as “Not verified” and is excluded from scoring rather than estimated.

• Regulatory standing — Licensing status, HUD/FHA standing, and regulatory action history.
• Availability — Where the lender is licensed and which products it can originate there.
• Product range — Breadth of reverse mortgage products, including purchase and proprietary programs.
• Cost transparency — Whether origination, servicing, and closing cost information is disclosed and sourced.
• Consumer feedback — Complaint history and verified consumer review data.

2. Lender inclusion criteria

A company must meet all of the following before it can appear in a ranked list.

• The company originates reverse mortgage products for U.S. homeowners, either directly or as a licensed originator.
• The company can be identified in regulator records, so its licensing and operating status can be checked against a primary source.
• Enough of the company's material data fields can be verified against approved sources to meet the minimum data-completeness requirement below.
• The company's operating status is confirmed as active as of the record's last verification date.

3. Exclusion criteria

A company is held out of ranked lists — though it may remain documented on the site — when any of the following apply.

• The company has exited reverse mortgage lending, or has been acquired and no longer originates under its own name.
• The company's operating or licensing status cannot be confirmed against a primary source.
• Required scoring inputs cannot be verified, leaving the record below the minimum data-completeness threshold.
• The company does not lend to consumers directly (for example, a pure servicer, investor, or wholesale-only counterparty).
• Material regulatory findings make consumer-facing ranking inappropriate pending editorial review.

4. Scoring components and current weights

Component weights must total 100% before a methodology version can be used. The configuration below totals 100% across 5 components, on a 0–5 score range shown to 1 decimal place.

Weights marked “placeholder” have not been set by editorial review yet. Until they are, this version stays in draft and no score is published.

5. Approved data sources for each component

Each input declares the source types accepted as evidence. A value sourced from anywhere else does not qualify as verified and cannot contribute to a score, no matter how plausible it looks.

6. How the calculation works

Scoring is a pure, deterministic function: the same verified dataset plus the same methodology version always produces the same scores and the same order.

• Commercial data — partner status, outbound links, disclosure type — is stripped from the record before it reaches the scoring function, so it cannot influence a score even accidentally.
• Each input is read from the canonical record, checked for an eligible source, then normalized to a 0–1 scale using the method shown above.
• Inputs are combined into a component score using their in-component weights; components are combined into the composite using the weights in section 4.
• The composite is mapped onto the 0–5 range and rounded to 1 decimal place.
• If required inputs are missing, the component and the composite return null. No placeholder or averaged score is substituted.

7. Tiebreak rules

When two companies finish with identical composite scores, the following rules are applied in order. Tiebreaks may never read commercial fields; the configuration is rejected at validation time if one does. If every rule ties, the stable internal record ID decides, so the order never drifts between builds.

8. Minimum data-completeness requirements

A company's record must reach 80% verified completeness across scored fields before a composite score may be published, and each component carries its own threshold shown in section 4.

Below those thresholds the company is shown as “Rating pending” and is not assigned a rank. We would rather publish nothing than publish a number we cannot support.

9. How lender status changes are handled

Companies leave and re-enter this market. Each record carries an explicit status with an effective date, and status drives ranking eligibility directly.

10. Exited, acquired and no-longer-ranked companies

The following companies in our data set are currently outside active ranking. Each remains documented, with its status and the date that status took effect where verified.

11. How compensation is separated from rankings

Rankings and scores are determined by our published editorial methodology and are not influenced by compensation.

This separation is enforced in code, not only by policy: commercial fields live in a separate part of each record and are removed before scoring runs, and any methodology configuration that references a commercial field fails validation and cannot be used.

• Scoring inputs may not reference partner status, advertising status, outbound links or disclosure type.
• Tiebreak rules are subject to the same restriction.
• Editorial notes and manual scores are excluded from the scoring function.
• Any commercial relationship that exists will be disclosed and labeled where it appears.

12. Verification and update process

Each material field carries its own source URL, publisher, source type, retrieval date, verification status and confidence, so any figure on the site can be traced back to where it came from. The workflow below describes the intended process; each step is labeled with whether it is actually running today.

13. Corrections

If anything on this site is wrong, we want it flagged. Our full corrections process, including how corrections are logged and published, is documented on the corrections page.

14. Methodology change history

Each version records its effective date, status and what changed. Rankings are always produced by a specific version, so past results stay reproducible.