Idaho Mortgage Broker Bond

Twenty-five thousand dollars for the main office, plus ten thousand dollars for every licensed branch office you operate in Idaho. A single-location broker posts a flat $25,000 bond. Add one branch and the required penal sum becomes $35,000; three branches puts you at $55,000. The figure comes straight from Idaho Code § 26-3110, part of the Idaho Residential Mortgage Practices Act, and it applies to the mortgage lender license on the same terms as the broker license.

No, and that is the detail most out-of-state brokers get wrong. States like Washington, Nevada, and Tennessee scale the mortgage bond to your prior-year origination dollars, so a high-volume shop posts a much larger bond than a small one. Idaho ignores volume entirely. What moves your number in Idaho is physical footprint — the count of licensed branch offices — not how many loans you close or how large they are. A boutique broker doing $200 million from one office and a startup doing $5 million from one office post the identical $25,000 bond.

Yes. Idaho Code § 26-3110 lets you file, in lieu of the surety bond, a certificate of deposit issued by an Idaho bank and made payable to the Director of the Department of Finance, in the same principal amount the bond would require. The interest stays payable to you. The catch is that the CD ties up the full $25,000 (plus $10,000 per branch) in cash and must remain in effect for at least three years after you stop doing mortgage business, unless the Director releases it earlier. A surety bond costs a small annual premium instead of locking up the whole amount, which is why almost every licensee chooses the bond.

Both. The Idaho Residential Mortgage Practices Act applies the same bonding requirement to mortgage lenders — companies that fund loans in their own name — as it does to mortgage brokers that arrange loans through third-party lenders. Whichever license the Department of Finance issues you, the $25,000-plus-$10,000-per-branch security has to be on file, and it has to stay continuously in force for as long as you hold the license.

The Idaho Department of Finance administers mortgage licensing under Title 26, Chapter 31, and it will not issue or renew a license without the bond (or CD) on file. The bond is a continuing obligation of the surety — it does not expire annually the way a one-year permit might — but if it is canceled and you do not replace it, you fall out of compliance and the Department can take action against your license. Because the surety's total liability is capped at the face amount of the bond, a paid claim can erode the coverage and force you to re-bond, so keeping claims off the bond matters.

They are sized on completely different logic, so you cannot copy one state's number to another. Idaho is branch-based and flat at $25,000. Washington and Nevada both scale by loan volume, so your Western-state bonds can be much larger than your Idaho bond even for the same company. If you are licensed across the region, the practical move is to price each state on its own statute rather than assume one figure covers all of them — tell us your footprint and we will quote each state correctly.