FR 2028 Reporting: New FR 2028D Questions, Redesign Still Pending

For FR 2028 reporting, the Federal Reserve Board changed less on 29 September 2026 than its April proposal promised. That day the Board updated its reporting-forms pages for the FR 2028b/s, the Survey of Terms of Bank Lending to Farmers with its Prime Rate Supplement, and for the FR 2028D, the Small Business Lending Survey. The three reports make up the Survey of Small Business and Farm Lending, cleared under OMB control number 7100-0061, and the FR 2028D quarter ending 30 September 2026 opens its submission period the next day.

The reissued forms carry a new OMB approval date, and the FR 2028D gains a rewritten Special Questions section. They do not carry the redesign the Board put out for comment on 10 April 2026: a single FR 2028B absorbing the FR 2028S prime rate page, with an email field and a “no loans to report” indicator from the 3 August 2026 survey week, plus clarified FR 2028D instructions on maximum maturity and commitments from the 30 September 2026 as-of date. The Board’s review page still lists the FR 2028 collection as pending review of public comment, with no final Federal Register notice.

Panel banks are working two tracks at once. One is the set of forms that are live now. The other is a proposal whose first effective date has passed without the combined form appearing as current, and whose second effective date arrives with the old FR 2028D instructions still posted.

Related reading: Form BT Monthly Reporting: The New Statistical Notice 2026/08 Test

FR 2028 reporting dates from the proposal to early 2027

• 10 April 2026: the Board publishes its proposal to extend the FR 2028 collection for three years, with revision (91 FR 18460).
• 9 June 2026: the comment period closes.
• 31 July 2026: reginfo.gov records an emergency extension of OMB 7100-0061 as approved. The previous versions of the forms printed an approval expiry of 31 July 2026.
• 3 August 2026: the proposed as-of date for the combined FR 2028B, with transmission from 10 August 2026. The FR 2028b/s form posted as current, dated 08/2026, keeps the two reports separate.
• 29 September 2026: the FR 2028b/s and FR 2028D pages show a last update on this date.
• 30 September 2026: FR 2028D as-of date for the third quarter, and the proposed effective date for the FR 2028D instruction clarifications.
• 1 October 2026: the FR 2028D submission period begins, the day after quarter end.
• 2 November 2026: the first full business week of November begins, which makes it the next FR 2028B survey week on the instructions’ definition.
• 16 November 2026: the FR 2028D submission period ends, counting 14 days after the first business day of November (Monday 2 November).
• 31 January 2027: the OMB approval expiry printed on every current FR 2028 form.

The two November dates are a calendar count from the rules in the instructions. The Reserve Bank that runs the respondent’s panel relationship is the authority on the exact window.

Three reports under one control number, all voluntary

The Board describes the Survey of Small Business and Farm Lending as three reports. The FR 2028B collects detailed data on individual farm loans funded during the first full business week of the mid-month of each quarter: February, May, August and November. The FR 2028S collects the prime interest rate for each day of that survey week. The FR 2028D collects quarterly average figures on the terms of small business loans, plus qualitative answers on how terms, standards and demand changed and why. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City publishes the aggregates, the farm data as its National Survey of Terms of Lending to Farmers and the small business data as its Small Business Lending Survey; its most recent small business release, dated 24 September 2026, covered the second quarter of 2026.

The legal basis printed on every form is 12 U.S.C. 248(a)(2), section 11(a)(2) of the Federal Reserve Act, which lets the Board require depository institutions to report their assets and liabilities where the Board considers the reports necessary or desirable for monitoring and controlling monetary and credit aggregates. The forms then ask for “voluntary cooperation”, and the supporting statement is explicit: survey submissions are voluntary.

The panels are samples, and both run below their authorised size. According to the supporting statement dated 13 April 2026:

• FR 2028B and FR 2028S: an authorised panel of 250 domestically chartered commercial banks, drawn since 1989 from a random sample stratified by farm loan volumes, with 175 banks reporting (117 with total consolidated assets under $850 million, 58 at or above).
• FR 2028D: an authorised panel of 398 domestically chartered commercial banks, stratified by the dollar volume of commercial and industrial (C&I) loans with original amounts of $1,000,000 or less, with 181 reporting (50 small, 131 large).

Voluntary membership separates the FR 2028 from a mandatory US return such as Form PF reporting for private fund advisers. The instructions still ask panel banks for row-level precision, down to rates entered to three decimal places.

Confidentiality is worded differently across the documents, and the difference matters for any internal sign-off that relies on it. The FR 2028B form says the Federal Reserve System “regards the individual institution information provided by each respondent as confidential” and will notify respondents if release is later required. The FR 2028D form carries no confidentiality sentence at all. The supporting statement is the most precise text: a respondent may request confidential treatment, the Board decides case by case, and exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552(b)(4)) may apply to nonpublic commercial or financial information that is customarily and actually treated as private.

The reissued FR 2028b/s form, compared line by line

Set the current FR 2028b/s PDF, stamped 08/2026, beside the September 2023 version it replaces and the differences are small. Page 1 is still the FR 2028B loan grid with fifteen columns and the same item codes, from QTFL 9912 (date made) and QTFL 1596 (face amount) through QTFL A344 (risk rating) and QTFL K806 (location of borrower). The respondent block still asks for name, address, contact person and phone number, with no email line. Page 2 is still a separate FR 2028S, a five-row Monday to Friday table with the date in XMTA 9912 and the prime rate in XMTA 7923, entered to three decimal places. It is the same side-by-side check that applies when any central bank reissues a statistical form, as in our guide to Bank of England Form PL definitions.

Two things moved. The printed approval expiry on both pages changed from July 31, 2026 to January 31, 2027, and the version stamp changed from 09/2023 to 08/2026. The burden statements did not: 1.4 hours per response for the FR 2028B and 0.1 hours for the FR 2028S, as before. The instructions posted as current are the FR 2028B instructions labelled “Effective August 2012”.

The reissue is an approval-date update to the existing collection. A team that built the combined layout from the April draft materials should not expect the current form to match it, and any process that dropped the FR 2028S page in anticipation has dropped a page the current form still contains.

One sentence on the FR 2028S deserves attention because the draft rewrites it. The current page asks for the prime rate “for each day during the survey week for which your institution reports data on the FR 2028B”. That qualifier links to question 1 of the FR 2028B questions and answers: banks report loans only on the days their Federal Reserve Bank asks for, the number of days can be negotiated by size, and the chosen days stay consistent each quarter. The draft combined instructions ask for the prime rate “for each day during the survey week” without the qualifier. The final text will show whether that difference survives.

The combined FR 2028B that is still a proposal

The April notice proposed to fold the two farm reports into one FR 2028B form and one set of instructions, discontinuing the FR 2028S as a separate report. Two line items would be added: an email address in the respondent contact section and a “no loans to report” indicator. The notice gives the purpose as reducing respondent burden “from current outreach procedures in efforts to reduce redundant communication”. The effective date proposed was the 3 August 2026 as-of date, with transmission beginning 10 August 2026 and data drawn from loan activity in the first week of August 2026.

The draft materials posted with the proposal show what a respondent would actually fill in. The draft FR 2028B instructions carry a new title, “Survey of Prime Rate & Terms of Bank Lending to Farmers”, and a new page of prime rate instructions ahead of the loan columns. Dates in the prime rate table would be entered as four digits, so 4 May becomes 0504. The indicator would take one of two values:

• 1 where the institution did not originate, renew or participate in loan advances to farmers during the survey week.
• 2 where the institution had farm loan activity during the survey week but cannot complete the loan section.
• Blank where the institution reports loans in the Terms of Bank Lending to Farmers section.

On the draft’s wording the two values carry different messages: value 1 says no farm lending happened, value 2 says it happened and went unreported. That makes the choice of value 2 a sign-off question more than a data-entry one.

The burden arithmetic is also in the package. The supporting statement shows the current split as 1.17 hours per response for the FR 2028B and 0.28 hours for the FR 2028S, and the proposed combined report at 1.45 hours, leaving the collection total unchanged at 5,828 hours a year. The draft form prints 1.5 hours.

None of this is final. The Board’s page of collections under review lists FR 2028 under “Pending Review of Public Comment”, with the initial Federal Register notice linked and the final notice marked “Not Available”. The April notice itself says final versions of the documents will be made available on reginfo.gov if approved.

The email field needs one clarification, because it is easy to assume the proposal adds it everywhere. The FR 2028D already has one. The June 2025 FR 2028D form carried “E-mail Address of Contact (QSBL 4086)”, and the 09/2026 form keeps it. The proposed email line is a change to the farm report only.

FR 2028D for the quarter ending 30 September 2026

The current FR 2028D form runs to seven pages, one more than the June 2025 version. Pages 2 to 5, which hold items 4 to 17 (base rates, the outstanding and new loan blocks, credit line usage, demand, applications, denials, standards and terms), still carry the 09/2023 stamp and are unchanged. Page 1 was reprinted with the new expiry date and the same fields. The change is on pages 6 and 7.

Items 18 and 19 on applicant credit quality are unchanged. Special Question 1 still asks, across ten rows, what impact each factor will have on small business loan demand over the next 12 months, on a five-point scale from very negative to very positive, but two rows were rewritten and recoded:

• Row a, “Banking regulations” (QSBL QA96), became “Regulatory policy” (QSBL QN63).
• Row d, “Consumer behavior” (QSBL QA99), became “Consumer demand” (QSBL QN64).

The other rows (trade policy, interest rates, inflation, cost of labor, tax policy, supply chains, technology and other) keep their QA97, QA98 and QB00 to QB05 codes. A workpaper that rolls prior-quarter answers forward by row position would place last quarter’s view on banking regulations under a question about regulatory policy in general, which is a different question with a different code.

Special Question 2 is new. It asks what impact each factor will have on the bank’s own credit standards for C&I loans to US small businesses over the next 12 months, on a scale from significant tightening through no impact to significant easing. It has twelve rows, coded QSBL QN65 to QN76, with free text for “Other” in QN77. The rows split three ways:

• The outlook: expected economic conditions, certainty of the economic outlook, regulatory policy and government policy.
• The market: competition from other banks and from nonbank lenders, borrower creditworthiness and technology.
• The bank itself: risk tolerance, capital position and liquidity position.

The capital and liquidity rows sit closer to treasury and ALM than to the lending desk, so a bank that routes the survey to one credit officer may want those two answers checked with whoever owns the capital plan. The supporting statement says the Special Questions section can change periodically to address current events, answer questions from Board or local economists or feed the Kansas City release, so the page 7 block may not survive into later quarters.

Special Question 2 also sits next to item 14, which asks how the bank’s standards for the same loans changed over the most recent quarter. Item 14 is backward-looking and takes a single answer; Special Question 2 looks ahead a year and takes one answer per factor.

Maximum maturity and commitments: the clarifications the posted instructions do not yet show

The April notice proposed to clarify the FR 2028D instructions for items 5e and 7e on the meaning of “maximum maturity”, and for items 6 and 8 on the meaning of “commitment”, effective for the 30 September 2026 as-of date. The stated reason was feedback from respondents and data quality.

The FR 2028D instructions posted as current on the forms page are still labelled “Effective September 2023”, and they read as follows on the four items:

• Items 5e and 7e: “Report the maximum remaining maturity (in months).” The same sentence covers the stock of outstanding term loans at quarter-end (5e) and the new term loans booked during the quarter (7e).
• Item 6: commitments are “broadly defined to include all promises to lend that are expressly conveyed, orally or in writing, to the borrower”, falling into formal commitments and informal lines of credit. Authorizations or internal guidance lines where the customer is not told the amount are not commitments.
• The FAQ for item 6: a formal commitment is one for which the bank has charged a fee or other consideration or which is otherwise legally binding; a line of credit is an informal arrangement to lend within a set limit and quote a rate on demand, and “may not be legally binding”. A separate FAQ says revolving lines belong in items 6 and 8.

The draft redline posted with the proposal strikes “(formal or informal)” from the item 6 and item 8 captions, strikes the broad commitments paragraph under item 6 and strikes the whole item 6 FAQ. It also marks the one-line 5e and 7e instruction for change. The replacement wording sits in the redline’s comment annotations rather than on the printed page. For 5e and 7e the comment reads “Report the maximum maturity in months, which is the number of months remaining for the loan with the greatest outstanding maturity”, close to the “maximum remaining maturity” wording the posted instructions already carry, and gives the aim as reducing common misreporting. For items 6 and 8 the comment says to reference the Call Report instructions for the definition of a commitment.

The 09/2026 form still prints “(Formal or Informal)” in the item 6 and item 8 captions. The April 2026 notice proposed these changes to the FR 2028D instructions for the 30 September 2026 as-of date, but the Board’s review page still lists FR 2028 as pending review of public comment and shows no final Federal Register notice. Respondents should therefore use the current instructions supplied for the reporting cycle rather than the draft revisions, and the respondent’s Reserve Bank contact is the one to confirm which apply. The open question for loan-system mapping is whether informal lines of credit, which the current text puts inside items 6 and 8, remain there once the Board publishes final instructions.

Scope lines that separate FR 2028 figures from Call Report small business data

FR 2028D answers and Call Report small business figures are built on different definitions, and the instructions say so. The FR 2028D covers C&I loans, using the Call Report definition in Schedule RC-C, Part I, item 4 (item 4.a for FFIEC 031 and 041 filers, US-domiciled addresses within item 4 for FFIEC 051 filers, domestic offices in column B for banks with foreign offices), made to US nonfarm businesses with no more than $5 million in total annual revenue. Overnight loans, credit card loans and construction and land development loans not secured by real estate are in. Loans secured by real estate are out, even for commercial purposes, together with intercompany loans, loans to financial institutions, unplanned overdrafts, trading loans and loans in non-US currencies.

Schedule RC-C, Part II of the Call Report measures something else. On the FFIEC 051 it is completed in the June and December reports only, while FFIEC 031 and 041 filers complete it quarterly, and it counts loans by size: C&I and nonfarm nonresidential loans with original amounts of $1 million or less, and farm loans with original amounts of $500,000 or less. The FR 2028D FAQ addresses the obvious shortcut directly: a bank asked whether it could reuse the RC-C Part II definition, and the answer was that small business loans are generally small but not every small loan goes to a small business, which is why the survey keys on borrower revenue.

As an illustration built from those definitions: a $750,000 C&I line to a manufacturer with $12 million in annual revenue counts toward the Call Report’s small business loans, since its original amount is under $1 million, and falls outside FR 2028D, since the borrower’s revenue is over $5 million. A $600,000 loan to a small retailer secured by its store is in RC-C Part II as nonfarm nonresidential and out of FR 2028D as real-estate secured.

Banks that do not track borrower revenue have a documented route. Footnote 1 of the FR 2028D instructions lets them use internal criteria, and item 1 records the choice: it is completed in the March report each year, on any change to the internal definition, and by first-time filers whatever the report date. The Federal Reserve’s own surveys use a third definition as well. The supporting statement notes that the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (FR 2018) defines small firms as those with annual sales under $50 million.

The FR 2028B draws its scope from the Call Report as well: loans to farmers means RC-C, Part I, item 3 (agricultural production and other loans to farmers) and item 1.b (loans secured by farmland), advanced during the survey week, at $3,000 or more. It is loan-level, one row per loan, but only for one week a quarter, a much narrower slice than a standing loan-by-loan dataset such as the one described in our AnaCredit reporting guide for Germany. The FR 2028B instructions also exclude existing variable-rate loans whose rate resets during the survey week because the base rate moved; a repricing is not a new loan for this survey.

Frequently Asked Questions

We made no farm loans in the survey week. How do we say so on the current FR 2028B?

The current form and the August 2012 instructions contain no nil-return field, and the questions and answers do not cover the case. The “no loans to report” indicator exists only in the draft combined form. The notice describes that indicator as a way to cut redundant communication in current outreach, so until a final form is posted the Reserve Bank contact remains the channel for a week with nothing to report.

The loan system produces an effective rate. Can we report that?

Both surveys ask for the stated nominal rate. FR 2028B question 7 says to report the nominal rate and leave the calculation of effective rates to the Federal Reserve, which uses the nominal rate and the compounding frequency in column 4. The FR 2028D weighted averages use each loan’s stated nominal rate, with the effective rate and the APR excluded by name, and the appendix allows a simple average where a weighted one cannot be calculated.

Should a renewal show up in more than one FR 2028D item?

It can. Renewals of term loans are included in item 7 (new term C&I loans), and the FAQ for item 12 says a renewal counts as an application received and approved. New term loans reported in item 7 also appear in the outstanding figures in item 5, and new commitment loans in item 8 also appear in item 6, so the same loan can legitimately sit in three places.

Our outstanding balance differs between the contractual and the accounting view. Which one goes in item 5b?

The FAQ says accounting book balance, the figure net of charge-offs, interest payments applied to principal and deferred fees. Face amount in item 5b means the current outstanding face amount: a loan originated at $1,000,000 and paid down to $600,000 is reported at $600,000.

What happens to the February 2027 surveys if the forms still show the current expiry?

The first full business week of February 2027 starts on Monday 1 February, the day after the approval expiry printed on the current forms. On the instructions’ rule, the fourth-quarter 2026 FR 2028D window also runs from 1 January 2027 into mid-February. The posted materials do not say which form version will carry those surveys; the next OMB action will appear in the reginfo.gov history for 7100-0061 and on the Board’s FR 2028 review page.

If the combined FR 2028B is adopted, does a bank need to join or leave anything?

The proposal changes forms, not panels. The notice keeps the authorised FR 2028B panel at 250 banks and the FR 2028D panel at 398, and the supporting statement recommends no change to either. Participation stays voluntary under the same statutory authority.

Related Articles

• Form BT Monthly Reporting: The New Statistical Notice 2026/08 Test: how a central bank statistical notice changes a monthly return, and what reporters check when the form is reissued.
• Bank of England Form PL: What UK Teams Must Check for 2027: definitions work on another central bank statistical form, with its own version cycle.
• AnaCredit Reporting in Germany: Bundesbank Credit Data and Deadlines: a standing loan-level credit dataset, useful as a contrast to the one-week FR 2028B sample.
• Form PF Reporting: Thresholds, Deadlines and the July 2027 Form Switch: a mandatory US return where SEC registration and a $150 million private fund assets test, not a survey panel, decide who files.
• RTRS Reporting: Municipal Trades to the MSRB Within 15 Minutes: US transaction reporting with real-time clocks, at the opposite end from a quarterly survey.

Key Takeaways

• Q3 2026 FR 2028D: use the seven-page 09/2026 form; Special Question 2 on page 7 needs twelve rated rows (QN65 to QN76) plus QN77 text where “Other” is used.
• Remap Special Question 1 rows a and d before rolling answers forward: QN63 and QN64 replace QA96 and QA99, and the wording changed with the codes.
• Route the capital-position and liquidity-position rows of Special Question 2 to whoever owns those numbers before submission.
• Keep the FR 2028S prime rate page in the November 2026 FR 2028B pack; the combined form, email line and no-loans indicator are proposals until a final notice is published.
• Map items 5e, 7e, 6 and 8 to the instructions posted as current (labelled Effective September 2023, with “maximum remaining maturity” for 5e and 7e), informal lines of credit included, and flag the mapping for review once final instructions post.
• Diary the FR 2028D close on 16 November 2026 and watch reginfo.gov for the next OMB action on 7100-0061 ahead of the February 2027 surveys.

Sources and References

• Federal Reserve Board, reporting forms: FR 2028b/s, Survey of Terms of Bank Lending to Farmers/Prime Rate Supplement (last update 29 September 2026): federalreserve.gov/apps/reportingforms/Report/Index/FR_2028bs
• Federal Reserve Board, reporting forms: FR 2028D, Small Business Lending Survey (last update 29 September 2026): federalreserve.gov/apps/reportingforms/Report/Index/FR_2028D
• Current FR 2028B and FR 2028S form (08/2026, approval expires January 31, 2027): FR 2028b/s current form (PDF)
• FR 2028B and FR 2028S form, September 2023 version (approval expires July 31, 2026): FR 2028b/s September 2023 form (PDF)
• Instructions for Preparation of Survey of Terms of Bank Lending to Farmers, FR 2028B, effective August 2012: FR 2028B current instructions (PDF)
• Current FR 2028D form (09/2026, approval expires January 31, 2027): FR 2028D current form (PDF)
• FR 2028D form, June 2025 version: FR 2028D June 2025 form (PDF)
• Instructions for the Preparation of Small Business Lending Survey, FR 2028D, effective September 2023: FR 2028D current instructions (PDF)
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Proposed Agency Information Collection Activities; Comment Request (FR 2028), 91 FR 18460, 10 April 2026: govinfo.gov FR Doc. 2026-06970 (PDF) and federalregister.gov/d/2026-06970
• Federal Reserve Board, information collections under review (FR 2028: Pending Review of Public Comment): federalreserve.gov/apps/reportingforms/review
• Supporting Statement for the Survey of Small Business and Farm Lending (FR 2028; OMB No. 7100-0061), 13 April 2026: FR 2028 OMB supporting statement (PDF)
• Draft FR 2028B form and draft FR 2028B instructions (proposal materials): FR 2028B draft form (PDF) and FR 2028B draft instructions (PDF)
• Draft FR 2028D instructions (proposal materials, redline): FR 2028D draft instructions (PDF)
• OMB control number 7100-0061 history, reginfo.gov: reginfo.gov PRA history for 7100-0061
• 12 U.S.C. 248, enumerated powers of the Board (subsection (a)(2)): law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/248
• FFIEC 051 Call Report instructions, Schedule RC-C, Part II, Loans to Small Businesses and Small Farms: fdic.gov RC-C Part II instructions (PDF)
• FFIEC 031 and 041 Call Report instructions, Schedule RC-C, Part II, Loans to Small Businesses and Small Farms: fdic.gov RC-C Part II instructions (PDF)
• Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Small Business Lending Survey: kansascityfed.org/surveys/small-business-lending-survey

Before the November FR 2028B survey week

The next farm survey week begins on Monday 2 November 2026, and the form posted as current for it is the two-page FR 2028b/s stamped 08/2026, prime rate page included. Before that week, pull the FR 2028 entry on the Board’s review page and the 7100-0061 history on reginfo.gov: a final Federal Register notice or a new OMB action is the signal that the combined FR 2028B and the rewritten FR 2028D instructions have moved from draft to current.

Disclaimer: The information on RegReportingDesk.com is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, regulatory, tax, or compliance advice. Always consult your compliance officer, legal counsel, or the relevant supervisory authority for guidance specific to your institution.