The simple version

Your lender does not keep a vault of cash equal to every home loan it writes. It needs somewhere to borrow at a predictable cost, and not only when conditions are calm.

One answer is an institution built for exactly that and held jointly by the lenders themselves. They join it, pledge home loans and other assets as security, and borrow against them. Because they hold the shares, the profit returns to them as a rate on those shares.

The structure is older and odder than it sounds, and the quarterly filings are public. One arrived on October 23.

The numbers

• Dividend: an annualized rate of 9.95 percent on average activity-based stock and 6.95 percent on average membership stock, unchanged from the prior quarter. Payments are expected to total $194 million on November 10, 2026.
• Advances totaled $136.1 billion at quarter end. Letters of credit totaled $21.1 billion. Mortgage loans held for portfolio, net, totaled $16.0 billion. Retained earnings totaled $4.0 billion.
• Net income: $200 million for the quarter and $687 million for the nine months, against $259 million and $658 million for the same periods in 2025.
• Net interest income: $314 million for the quarter and $978 million for the nine months, a decrease of $21 million and an increase of $106 million against the same periods in 2025.
• Statutory Affordable Housing Program assessments: $23 million for the quarter and $77 million for the nine months.
• Voluntary housing and community contributions: $54 million for the quarter and $109 million for the nine months, including the voluntary contribution to the same program.
• The filing states the Bank contributes 10 percent of its net income each year to that program, and separately that it accrued $31 million, including $26 million in the quarter, in excess of the statutory accrual.
• Nine-month averages: advance balances averaged $135.9 billion, letters of credit averaged $19.5 billion, mortgage loan balances averaged $15.2 billion, and the Bank held an average of $29.8 billion of short-term assets.
• Figures are the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines's own, from the exhibit filed with its Form 8-K on October 23, 2026. Balances are as of September 30, 2026.

Why there are two rates and not one

An institution like this has to decide what it is paying for. Belonging is one thing and use is another, and this one prices them separately.

Joining requires buying one kind of stock. Borrowing requires buying more of a second kind, tied to how much you actually take. The rate in the October filing is higher on the second kind than on the first, by exactly three points.

Read plainly, that is a structure which pays you more for using the institution than for belonging to it. The firms holding the stock and the firms taking the money are the same firms, so the question of which group benefits does not arise the way it would at an ordinary company.

The actual math on required versus voluntary

The filing separates two kinds of housing money, and the order of their sizes is the part worth slowing down for. The required figure is $23 million for the quarter. The voluntary figure is $54 million.

So the amount booked by choice was more than twice the amount required by law. The longer period in the same table runs the same direction, and those figures are in The numbers above. Both comparisons are ours, read off lines the filing prints separately, and both describe amounts booked rather than cash already paid out.

Anyone who knows only the headline rule would have the story backwards. The rule sets a floor on one number, and it says nothing about the second.

What this means

If your lender is one of its members, part of the machinery behind your home loan is an institution your lender holds stock in. This filing does not say which kinds of institution are eligible to join, so that is not a claim about every lender. It is simply a layer most people never see named.

It also explains why these institutions publish quarterly like a public company while having no shares you can buy. The owners are the lenders, the reports are public, and the figures are the cleanest window a non-specialist has into what wholesale funding costs.

The transferable habit is narrower than the subject. When an organization reports a required contribution and a voluntary one, read both before deciding which rule is doing the work.

What this is NOT

This article explains what a Federal Home Loan Bank is and how its two share classes are paid, using the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines's own quarterly exhibit filed October 23, 2026 as the worked example. It is not a recommendation about any security, any lender, or any mortgage decision, and these cooperatives have no shares available to the public in any case. We do not give personalized advice. It does not predict where borrowing costs, payout rates, or housing contributions go next. The comparison between the required and voluntary housing figures is our reading of two lines the filing prints separately; the filing does not present it as a comparison. We have deliberately not divided the quarterly housing assessment by quarterly net income: the filing says the contribution is 10 percent of net income each year, and an annual rule and a quarterly accrual are not the same arithmetic, so that division would produce a rate the filing does not claim. Figures describe one of these institutions on one date and are not a description of the wider system, which this article does not count or characterize. This is not a political endorsement or criticism of anyone.

Sources

• Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K filed October 23, 2026, accession 0001628280-26-066996. Dividend rates, balances, net income, net interest income, and the housing program figures.