About Joinable

Joinable is a plain-language directory of credit unions you can actually join — who qualifies, how hard the published path looks, and what fees show up on official pages — with sources you can check.

Who runs this

Joinable is operated by CC Pearce. It is an independent research project, not a credit union, bank, broker, or financial advisor. Listings summarize published field-of-membership (FOM) and fee materials; they are not recommendations to join any particular institution.

Methodology

Sources: Prefer the credit union’s own membership / eligibility page; fall back to NCUA materials or other official pages when needed. Every listing cites URLs.
Easy / Medium / Hard: Labels summarize published FOM text — county/statewide live-work-worship-school or free association (Easy); city/ZIP lists or small paid association paths (Medium); employer/school/occupation-only (Hard). Labels are not marketing scores.
Fees: We only quote share deposits, membership fees, and related figures that appear on a published schedule or join page. If it isn’t published, we say so.
Last verified: We re-check membership pages about every 90 days and treat listings as stale after ~120 days. Each page shows a last-verified date.

Not a guarantee: Matching a published join path does not mean you will be approved. Credit unions still run identity checks (CIP) and their own account rules. Always confirm on the credit union’s site before applying. See Not financial advice Spot an error? .

Update cadence

Hubs and guides are updated when we add metros or re-verify a cluster of listings. Individual CU pages get a new “last verified” stamp when we re-read their membership materials. Spot something wrong sooner? Use corrections.

Corrections & contact

If a fee, FOM summary, or source link is wrong or outdated, tell us via Corrections or email ccpearce5@gmail.com.

ZIP → county methodology

Crosswalk: U.S. Census Bureau 2020 ZCTA5–County Relationship File (tab20_zcta520_county20_natl.txt). Cached under data/ on our build machine.
Multi-county ZCTAs: We assign the county with the largest land-area overlap. ZCTA ≈ ZIP for most residential lookups; unique PO-box ZIPs may be missing.
Matching: Listings match when published FOM covers that county, that state (statewide), a nationwide open path, or a labeled association/Foundation path. ZIP-list / census-tract FOMs are labeled check your address — we never claim whole-county coverage for those.
County pages: Crawlable /county/… pages are generated only when at least five verified listings match (quality bar; not every U.S. county).

What we don’t do (yet)

No rate shopping, APY leaderboards, or “best account” rankings.
No paid email ESP yet — listing alerts use a mailto bridge until CC picks a provider.
No applications hosted on Joinable — you always finish on the credit union’s site.

About page updated 2026-10-26 (America/Los_Angeles).