Japanese banks are still approving the overwhelming majority of loan-condition change requests, according to the Financial Services Agency’s latest update on modification cases through the end of April. For small and medium-sized business borrowers, banks approved 380,501 requests out of 394,543 submitted, a 96.9% approval rate across major banks, 98.9% at regional banks, and 91.9% at other banks.
Household mortgage requests show a similar pattern, if at a smaller scale. Banks approved 6,715 of 8,125 applications, or 93.4% overall. Regional banks handled the largest share of those cases and posted a 93.9% approval rate, while major banks came in at 91.7% and other banks at 91.0%.
The headline number for business borrowers is the regional-bank volume. Regional banks processed 343,887 SME requests through April and executed 332,052 of them, far more than major banks’ 50,329 requests and 48,199 executions. That matters because modification requests are often the pressure valve when a borrower needs breathing room rather than a new loan, and the regional-bank figures suggest that pressure valve is still working at scale.
The FSA’s tables also show that this is not a neat, single-month scoreboard. The agency says some executions, rejections, pending cases and withdrawals include applications received before March 2026, so the totals do not line up exactly with current-period applications. That caveat keeps the data useful for direction, but not for pretending every row is a pristine April-only snapshot. Financial statistics are rarely that polite.
For business readers, the takeaway is straightforward: approval rates remain high in both SME and household cases, but the gap between banks is still meaningful. Regional banks are approving at the high end of the range, while the smaller “other banks” bucket remains noticeably lower on both SME and household modification requests.