Seattle just set a new benchmark for credit union banking. In 2025, a record 35% of local households — roughly 557,000 — used a credit union as their primary bank. That’s the highest share Nielsen has recorded since tracking began in 2004. But what really sets Seattle apart isn’t just the total. It’s how fast we got there.

There’s some history behind the increase.

It started shortly after the Great Recession, when commercial megabanks tried to squeeze consumers just a little too hard. In 2011, Bank of America announced a $5-a-month debit card fee. It was a public relations disaster, and the backlash was immediate. Activists heavily promoted “Bank Transfer Day,” urging consumers to move their money en masse from big corporate banks to not-for-profit credit unions.

In the Seattle area, many consumers made the leap — and they’ve kept doing so. In 2010, just before the debit card fee fiasco, around 23% of households here used a credit union as their primary bank. After Bank Transfer Day, that figure quickly jumped to around 30%. Local credit unions expected the momentum to slow, and it did, but the new Nielsen data shows it didn’t stop.

That’s not true for every part of the country. In many metro areas, the initial anger at commercial banks fizzled, with little sustained change at the teller window. In fact, in many metros, the share of households using a credit union as their primary bank today is pretty much the same as in 2010 — or even lower.

Seattle’s jump from roughly 23% of households in 2010 to 35% in 2025 — about a 12 percentage point increase — ranks as the second-largest among the 50 most populous metro areas. The one metro with a bigger increase? Our Northwest neighbor, Portland, went from about 21% to 34% over the same period. Milwaukee ranked third, with a 10 point increase.

A few metro areas saw a significant decline in credit union households between 2010 and 2025. Orlando, Fla., had the biggest drop, falling from about 25% to 18% — roughly 7 percentage points. Indianapolis and Raleigh, N.C., also saw large declines, suggesting that whatever fueled the Pacific Northwest’s shift wasn’t shared nationwide.

Nielsen surveyed about 211,000 adults nationally, including about 2,900 in the Seattle metro area, from July 2024 to October 2025. The Seattle metro area includes King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties and had about 1.59 million households.

Whenever I see Seattle and Portland ranked one and two on a list like this, I suspect it says something about the Pacific Northwest ethos — and I think this may be one of those cases. Perhaps our region has always harbored a distinct consumer culture, one that values community investment and keeping local dollars in local hands.

We show the same preference elsewhere: neighborhood farmers markets over supermarket chains, independent coffee roasters over national chains, member-owned grocery co-ops over big-box stores.

That same localized loyalty may have naturally extended to financial services like credit unions. While the megabanks have leaned on national ad campaigns and the ubiquity of their ATM networks, Pacific Northwest credit unions have thrived on grassroots appeal.

According to Nielsen, Washington’s largest credit union — BECU — is also the No. 1 bank among Seattle-area households, with around 20% using it as their primary bank. Chase was second, at around 16%.

And in a bit of localized poetic justice, Bank of America, the institution that inadvertently sparked this regional exodus back in 2011, now ranks third locally at 13% — trailing the homegrown cooperative model by a wide margin.