A loan tape is a spreadsheet or flat file with one row per loan and one column per fact about it, such as origination terms, borrower and collateral details, the current balance and the payment status, as of a stated date. Buyers, investors, warehouse lenders and auditors review the tape before they sample individual loan files.
Why it matters when licensing company data
Performance fields are what turn a tape into a history. Public loan-level datasets such as Freddie Mac's include the monthly loan balance, delinquency status and a code for why a balance fell to zero, which lets an analyst follow each loan from funding to payoff or default.
A lender that keeps its tapes and loan files for years holds decisions linked to outcomes: what was approved, on what terms, and how the loan performed. Borrower identities, suspicious activity report material and credit bureau data have to be removed, and investor agreements checked, before any of it can be shared.
Example
A small-business lender preparing to sell a pool of loans builds a loan tape with one row per loan: amount, rate, term, industry, collateral, current balance and days past due. The buyer's analyst checks a sample of loan files against the tape. When the lender later considers licensing its history, it uses the same structure, drops every field that identifies a borrower and keeps the payment history that shows how each loan performed.
Source
Freddie Mac Single-Family Loan-Level Dataset. Definition reviewed November 9, 2026 by Origin Data Partners.