88,714 appraisers are licensed to sign off on a $2.05 trillion mortgage market. The count keeps falling.

Since 1989, federal law has required that almost every mortgage involving a federally regulated lender be backed by a real estate appraisal from someone whose competency has been independently certified.▸ Title XI of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act put a name on that requirement and a federal body, the Appraisal Subcommittee (ASC), in charge of tracking who holds it. Every state submits its appraiser rolls to the ASC's National Registry at least monthly. Counted directly from that live registry on July 10, 2026, the national total stood at 88,714 active appraiser credentials — Certified General, Certified Residential, and Licensed, summed across all 50 states, D.C., and the territories. In December 2022, per the Appraisal Institute's tally of the same federal registry, the total was 93,665. The workforce required by law to value the collateral behind the mortgage system has lost roughly one credential in twenty in under four years — while the market it serves kept growing.

The Mortgage Bankers Association's January 2026 forecast puts total 1-to-4-family mortgage origination volume at $2.05 trillion for 2025 — roughly 5.46 million loans — rising to $2.2 trillion in 2026.▸ Nearly every one of those loans, if it touches a federally regulated or federally related lender, needs a valuation from someone on the registry below. That's the mechanism Title XI built: a Certified General appraiser can value any property type; a Certified Residential appraiser is capped at one-to-four-unit residential property regardless of value; a Licensed appraiser works under narrower dollar and complexity limits still. All three credentials draw from the same state licensing boards, the same experience-hour and exam requirements, and — per this registry — the same shrinking base.

The decline isn't new or sudden — the Conference of State Bank Supervisors has been tracking appraiser shortages in rural and underserved markets since Congress directly acknowledged the problem in Section 103 of the 2018 Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which ordered federal regulators to study — and where possible ease — barriers to entering the profession.▸ CSBS's own research points to the credentialing pipeline itself as a bottleneck: the education and supervised-experience hours required to reach Certified General or Certified Residential status keep new entrants out faster than retirements and attrition can be replaced.

The registry isn't evenly distributed.▸ Eight states account for more than a third of all active credentials nationwide, led by California, Florida, and Texas — the same states driving the bulk of national transaction volume.

That concentration is exactly what makes a national average misleading: CSBS's research and state-level reporting both describe the shortage as sharpest away from these population centers.▸ In New Hampshire, for example, reporting by the Concord Monitor found the state's supply of assessment supervisors — the credential required to legally run a town's periodic property revaluation, a related but distinct credential from the ASC registry above — fell from about 100 in June 2020 to 80 in November 2025. Hudson's chief assessor, Jim Michaud, put the mechanical consequence plainly: "Without a supervisor, you can't run a revaluation. Without a supervisor, there's a lot of things you cannot do." One town, Colebrook, went to bid twice in 2024 looking for a contractor to handle its legally mandated revaluation and found no takers. State-level assessor licensing and the ASC's federally-related-transaction registry are administered separately, but both draw from the same basic pool of people willing to spend years qualifying to tell others what property is worth — and by both counts, that pool is thinning.

The 88,714 and by-state figures are a direct count from the ASC's live registry table on July 10, 2026, not a fixed annual snapshot; the registry updates at least monthly as states report, so the exact total will have moved by the time you read this. The New Hampshire assessor figures come from Concord Monitor reporting, not the ASC registry, and describe a related but legally distinct state credential.