We Analyzed 117 US Loan Products — Here Is What the Data Actually Shows

Every lender in our database is individually verified rather than pulled from a single aggregated feed, which gave us an unusually clean dataset to look at once we crossed 100 products. Here is what stood out across the 117 loans we track today, spanning 11 categories.

Personal loans are by far the most crowded category (63 of the 117 products), which tracks with how broad "personal loan" is as a use case, but it also means the APR spread is the widest of any category: from under 7% for the strongest-credit borrowers at lenders like American Express, up to the mid-30s for weaker credit at bad-credit specialists.

Mortgage was our newest and largest single addition, and the standout pattern was how much VA loans outperform every other loan type we track on cost: 0% down and no PMI is not matched by any non-mortgage category, and even beats most other mortgage types within the category itself.

Bad-credit-specific lenders (Upstart, OneMain, Avant, LendingPoint) cluster in a narrower band than expected: all four cap out at or near 35.99% APR, which appears to be closer to an informal market ceiling than four separate independent decisions.

Credit-builder and student loan categories had the lowest average minimum credit score requirements of any non-mortgage category, which makes sense given both are explicitly designed for borrowers who have not built a long credit history yet.

The category with the fewest options is home-improvement (currently 1 dedicated product), which is really an artifact of overlap: most home-improvement financing on the market is just a personal loan or HELOC marketed for that purpose, rather than a structurally distinct product, so it is underrepresented as its own category by design.