Privately Insured Credit Unions: How to Tell, and What It Means

Updated August 13, 2026. Quick answer: a small number of credit unions are not federally insured. Their deposits are covered by a private company, American Share Insurance, and by federal law the institution has to tell you so — on your statement, on your signature card, at the teller window and on its home page. The number of states involved is where every published version of this goes wrong: the only government source that counts them says 9, using 2015 data, while the insurer’s own site today lists 10. Those are different measurements of different things and we are not going to average them.

How to check yours, in one step

Do not rely on the word “insured”. The verification is a lookup tool run by the regulator:

“If you are unsure whether your credit union is federally insured, use our Find a Credit Union function. … Some deposits at state-chartered credit unions are insured by private insurers. These private insurers provide non-federal share insurance cov…” — mycreditunion.gov

The signage is also regulated, so the window itself is evidence. A federally insured credit union must display NCUA’s official sign at every station where funds are received, and its advertising statement is prescribed almost word for word — “Federally insured by NCUA” and three permitted variants. There is even a rule about shared counters: a federally insured credit union may not take deposits at the same teller window as a non-federally-insured one, which tells you the regulator considers the confusion real.

What the institution must tell you

This is the strongest consumer protection in the area, and it is statutory. A privately insured institution must disclose that fact:

“Include conspicuously in all periodic statements of account, on each signature card, and on each passbook, certificate of deposit, or share certificate. a notice that the institution is not federally insured, and that if the institution fails, the Federal Government does not guarantee that depositors will get back their money.” — www.govinfo.gov

The same section requires the notice in advertising, at every teller window and on the main internet page, and — the part most people have never heard of — a new customer cannot be signed up silently: the institution may accept the deposit only if the depositor has signed a written acknowledgment.

The implementing rule is now the CFPB’s Regulation I, which sets the periodic-statement language, the signage and internet-page requirements and the acknowledgment mechanics. If you bank at one of these institutions and have never seen that language, that is itself a finding.

The state count, and why published versions disagree

Two sources, two numbers, and they are not in conflict — they measure different things on different dates. Merging them is how the “9–10 states” hedge you see everywhere gets produced.

The government count is 9, and it is a statement about state law plus take-up:

“There are nine states where private deposit insurance is permitted and at least some credit unions have chosen to use it: Alabama, California, Maryland, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas.” — www.gao.gov

The insurer’s own current count is 10, and it is a statement about where its members are today — not a citation to anybody’s statute:

“American Share Insurance (ASI) provides trusted primary share insurance for credit unions, covering more than 1.3 million members in Alabama, California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas.” — www.americanshare.com

The difference is Montana, which appears on the insurer’s current list and not in GAO’s 2015 one. We have not read a state statute for any of these, so this page does not tell you which states permit private share insurance today — it tells you exactly what each source says and when it said it.

How big is this, really

“In 2015, a private company, American Mutual Share Insurance Corporation, or American Share Insurance (ASI), provided deposit insurance for 125 credit unions (about 2 percent of all credit unions).” — www.gao.gov

Roughly one credit union in fifty, on 2015 data, through a single company. That concentration is the risk worth understanding: there is no diversification among private insurers, because there is only one.

GAO also checked whether the disclosure rules are actually followed, and the answer is mostly yes with a specific hole: 45 of 47 credit unions visited displayed the teller-window notice and 99 of 102 websites carried it, while drive-through windows were the weak point.

What the private coverage actually says

The insurer advertises $250,000 per account rather than per individual, which is a genuinely different shape from the federal rule — NCUA and FDIC coverage is per owner per institution per category, so “per account, with no limit on the number of accounts” is not comparable to it and should not be read as more generous without checking the account structure. What is not in doubt is the backstop, because the insurer states it in capitals itself:

“MEMBERS’ ACCOUNTS ARE NOT INSURED OR GUARANTEED BY ANY GOVERNMENT OR GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED AGENCY.” — www.americanshare.com

That is the whole distinction. Federal share insurance is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. This is backed by a private company’s balance sheet, audited annually because federal law requires it.

Has a private insurer ever failed?

Yes, and the case is documented by GAO rather than by folklore:

“Several factors precipitated the closure of RISDIC in 1991. For example, weaknesses existed in the Rhode Island bank regulator’s and RISDIC’s oversight of institutions. Furthermore, some of the institutions insured by RISDIC engaged in high-risk activities. In 1991, RISDIC depleted its reserves beca…” — www.govinfo.gov

NCUA staff, quoted by GAO in 2017, characterise past private-insurer failures as driven mostly by severe regional economic shocks or, in some cases, a single major fraud. Both descriptions point the same way: the risk is correlated with the region, which is exactly when you would want the insurance to work.

One post-2015 change worth knowing if you are comparing institutions: the FAST Act let privately insured credit unions apply to join a Federal Home Loan Bank, which gave them access to a liquidity source they previously lacked.

What we could not establish, and are not going to invent

Three things this page will not tell you, because no primary source we reached would say them:

• How many privately insured credit unions exist in 2026. The newest government count is GAO’s, and it uses 2015 data. We found no more recent .gov figure, so we are quoting the old one with its date attached rather than refreshing it from a secondary source.
• Which states permit private share insurance today. Answering that means reading the credit-union act of each state, which this page has not done. The table above is two dated lists, not a legal conclusion.
• The 1985 Ohio deposit-insurance crisis. Widely cited, but the GAO report we retrieved covers only Rhode Island. We are not going to describe an event from memory.

Related: FDIC vs SIPC vs NCUA · insuring more than $250,000.

Sources

Statute and regulation from the United States Code, the eCFR and NCUA; the counts from GAO; the insurer’s own claims from its own site, marked as such. All read on August 13, 2026.

General information, not financial advice. The state lists above are two dated snapshots from two different kinds of source and neither is a statement of current state law. If you bank at a credit union and are unsure, use NCUA’s own lookup tool rather than this page.