Employee listening – the ongoing practice of gathering, analyzing, and acting on staff feedback rather than treating it as an annual box to check – is the difference between a company that surveys its people and one that is actually shaped by them. It is also, increasingly, the difference between a mortgage employer of choice and one that simply wants to be.

What separates a top mortgage employer from a merely good one, in other words, has less to do with what a company can afford and more to do with what it chooses to build.

In the US, the average number of production employees per mortgage company fell from 555 in the second quarter of 2022 to 337 in the first quarter of 2026, and mortgage loan officer headcount fell from a peak of 124,805 in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 86,192 in the first quarter of 2026, according to Mortgage Bankers Association and Nationwide Multistate Licensing System data reported by HousingWire. Most companies survey, yet few act. That gap is showing up hardest in a leaner industry, deciding which lenders and their technology partners make Mortgage Professional America’s list of the best mortgage companies to work for in the US.

The stakes go beyond payroll. Every loan officer a company loses mid-cycle takes licensing continuity, referral relationships, and client trust with them – and in a market already running leaner, replacing that experience costs more than retaining it. That is the backdrop against which MPA identified the Top Mortgage Employers 2026.

The winners’ list does not reward the best-worded mission statement or the flashiest perk. It rewards companies that hit a hard number: a 75 percent overall satisfaction threshold in an anonymous employee survey, set and answered entirely by the people doing the work, not the people managing them.

Among this year’s winners, two companies at opposite ends of the size spectrum cleared that bar by very different routes. KensieMae, a 10-to-100-employee remote mortgage technology and consulting firm based in Massachusetts, and Veterans United Home Loans, a 501-plus-employee national lender headquartered in Columbia, MO, both scored above 90 percent – proof that listening to employees is not about company size but relies on discipline.

What sets the best mortgage companies
to work for in the US apart?

Every company says it listens to its people. The data says most of them are lying to themselves. Perceptyx’s State of Employee Listening 2026 found that 71 percent of employees say their organization shares survey results with them, but only 51 percent believe that feedback has actually changed anything. That is not employee listening. That is employers who collect the data, publish the deck but change nothing. Worse, the trend is moving backward – the share of organizations relying mainly on occasional or isolated surveys, instead of continuous listening, climbed from 10 percent in 2025 to 22 percent in 2026.

How mortgage lenders are responding

Mortgage employers do not have the luxury of getting this wrong right now. Lenders are running leaner teams while holding the line on service quality, and the margin for disengaged staff has shrunk along with everything else, a dynamic explored in MPA’s recent coverage of how AI-driven headcount reductions are reshaping loan officer ranks. That pressure is showing up in where lenders choose to spend. More than 75 percent of respondents to The Mortgage Collaborative’s Pulse of the Network survey identified leadership development and employee engagement as key strategic initiatives for 2025–2026. Jodi Hall, president and chief executive officer of The Mortgage Collaborative, based in the United States, says the survey shows “technology, people, and partnerships are central” to how lenders are balancing cost discipline against long-term competitiveness.

MPA’s Top Mortgage Employers 2026 winners fall firmly into the group of companies acting on feedback rather than just collecting it, joining past honorees profiled in MPA’s Top Employers 2025 report.

Quick facts

KensieMae did not win on scale. It won on speed. The fully remote mortgage technology and consulting firm posted a 90.4 percent overall employee satisfaction rating from 42 employee responses against a workforce of just 10 to 100 people – proof that a company small enough to hear everyone does not need a committee to act on what it hears. Founded in 2014 and based in Massachusetts, KensieMae serves more than 1,000 independent mortgage banks, credit unions, and service providers. 

Its two highest-scoring categories in the employee survey were culture, with hybrid and flexible work options rated 9.79 out of 10, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, rated 9.68 out of 10. One employee of six to 10 years put it plainly in the anonymous survey: “Keep being awesome so our competitors continue to be puzzled as to how we are doing what we do. We are a very collaborative company and that helps us to stay on top of the best solutions for our clients and industry.”

At this size, there is no gap between an employee raising something and leadership responding to it. KensieMae’s bonus structure is built around that immediacy: most roles carry a monthly performance-based bonus plan, described internally as letting employees “give themselves a raise” at any time, on top of a $500 two-part employee referral bonus and a quarterly “Kensie Cares” award pairing a $1,000 bonus with a $1,000 donation to the winning employee’s charity of choice. The company also runs an annual paid Wellness and Recharge Week around the July 4 holiday, a company holiday it calls “KensieMae Day,” the Monday after Mother’s Day, and a paid day off within 30 days of each employee’s birthday. There was still room for improvement – one employee of four to five years wanted “actual healthcare” rather than the current “modest” marketplace plan contribution.

Tenure is rewarded, not just tolerated: employees earn up to 40 additional hours of paid time off (PTO) at five years of service and 80 additional hours at 10 years or more. KensieMae states the company places “significant weight... on ensuring employees feel appreciated, valued, and part of the success story,” pointing to company-paid retreats – including a Bahamas cruise for the entire company and employees’ spouses or partners – as evidence it is not just talk. A longer-tenured employee, with six to 10 years at the company, credited that follow-through directly: leadership shows “regular invested interest... in employee feedback, and actually caring about that feedback and implementing constructive changes to continuously improve employee experience.”

Quick facts

Veterans United Home Loans proves the opposite lesson: at 501-plus employees, listening does not scale through good intentions. It scales through infrastructure. The national lender posted a 92.9 percent overall employee satisfaction rating, built on standout ratings for unpaid sabbaticals at 9.64 out of 10 and family-friendly benefits at 9.57 out of 10, alongside a 9.82 out of 10 reputation score for accolades. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Columbia, MO, the company did not build that infrastructure for outside approval. 

“Our values were kind of written and created with our employees in mind and not just for the customer,” says Ian Franz, director of culture at Veterans United Home Loans. The company’s mission, adapted from those values, is to “enhance as many lives as possible for as long as possible” – a line Franz says deliberately includes coworkers and community, not only clients.

That mission shaped one of the company’s most contrarian calls. When the rest of the industry shifted toward remote and hybrid work after the pandemic, Veterans United moved the other way. “We kind of zigged when a lot of people zagged,” Franz says. Mortgage licensing rules limit which activities can happen outside a licensed facility, but Franz says the bigger factor was cultural: “The people being together is kind of the special sauce.”
 

“If we didn’t have the owners, the CEO, and the other execs’ buy-in, this would be a very different story. It would be so much harder for us to do anything, but they are the ones pushing us to do more”
Ian FranzVeterans United Home Loans 

The tradeoff is real, and Franz does not dress it up: “That does mean that sometimes we miss out on people, on talent, on opportunities.” The company applies the same logic to artificial intelligence. Rather than using AI to cut headcount, Franz frames it as a tool for capacity: “We don’t just view them as a line item on our books... we want to use this to make you more effective,” he says, adding that the goal is not to “replace people with AI so that we can close more loans and make more money.”

Every employee gets a 100 percent employer-sponsored gym membership, on-site fitness equipment, and access to a company bicycle-share program, backed by step-count competitions between office buildings and lunch-and-learn health sessions spanning physical and mental health topics. Its Lyra mental health benefit, fully employer-covered, gives every employee and their family members up to eight free counseling sessions per person each year – not a wellness slogan, a funded line item.

A hybrid employee with six to 10 years’ tenure summed up why that infrastructure lands: “VU is deeply committed to making this a great place to work, and they listen well to feedback and make changes where and when they can to support employees. No place is perfect to work, but the way that Veterans United is committed to living out its values as best as we can makes it a great place to be.”

Franz doesn’t pretend the company has this figured out effortlessly. Asked about the hardest ongoing challenge of scaling a 501-plus-employee culture, he didn’t point to a single crisis but to growth itself. “We are always dealing with a revolving door of people,” he says. “Any business that gets to a certain size, there’s always people that leave, and then you have to hire more people coming in.” The harder problem, he says, is what happens after someone accepts the job: “How do you make your home in a place that already feels like it’s been going for a long time and everybody’s already set in? Everybody’s already kind of set up with their friendships and their relationships and their systems. How do I enter into this thing?”

The company’s answer, largely unplanned, has been its small-group program involving book clubs, gaming groups, faith-based studies, and outdoor adventure clubs, supported by dedicated PTO. Nearly 2,000 have formed across the company over the past three years, with a 75.9 percent employee participation rate over that period. Franz traces the appeal to something simpler than any retention strategy: “It’s hard to make friends as an adult,” he says. “If you can come to work and you can share this thing that’s pretty dear to you... they can’t get enough.” The program is voluntary, but the company doesn’t stay neutral about it. “If you don’t participate in one, you’re missing out on one of the best parts of what we have to offer at this company, which is the people,” Franz says.

What keeps it running at that scale isn’t a dedicated team. “We do enough of the organizing and the administrative stuff, but the employees are the ones that do all the hard work,” Franz says – a division of labor he credits for the program growing organically rather than by mandate: “We started with it like, you know, this big, and then it’s just taken off over the years... we never want to get in the way of this thing feeding people’s needs, so we just try to make room for it.”

None of this was engineered from a strategy document, Franz says. “It’s almost like we’ve stumbled into having a high-trust environment” – the result of years of small decisions rather than a single initiative, and something he says the company now works deliberately to protect: “Distrust can spread really, really fast.” 

That same instinct extends outward through the Veterans United Foundation, now in its 15th year. Employees can pledge one percent of their paycheck, which the company matches in full – a structure that has generated more than $150 million in employee-driven giving. Grant decisions are made entirely by employee-led committees, and the fund is not limited to outside causes: employees can request support for coworkers facing personal hardship, from medical bills to car repairs. 

“It just feels like I get to give to the things and the people that I care about, but I do it through the foundation,” Franz says. “It is probably one of the things that people cite as one of their favorite parts of this company.”

The company’s philanthropy runs on the same logic as everything else Franz describes: employees choosing to build something together, not a program handed down from leadership. The Veterans United Foundation is now in its 15th year, funded entirely by employees who volunteer to pledge one percent of their paycheck – a contribution the company matches in full. Over 15 years, that structure has generated more than $150 million in employee-driven giving, with every grant decision made by employee-led committees rather than executives.

What makes the fund distinctive, Franz says, is that it doesn’t stop at the company’s walls. “We’re not just limited to things that are outside of our walls,” he says. “Part of the reason why we started this thing was because we have people who we work next to all the time that sometimes just have – the reality of life happens.” Any employee can submit a request on behalf of a struggling coworker, with no fixed limit on what they can ask for – medical treatment, a broken air conditioner, car repairs, whatever the situation calls for. “It just feels like I get to give to the things and the people that I care about, but I do it through the foundation,” Franz says. “And then I have all my coworkers, my brothers and sisters, joining along and making a bigger impact than I could by myself.” It’s a detail he returns to unprompted: of everything the company has built, he says the Foundation is “probably one of the things that people cite as one of their favorite parts of this company.”

The mortgage employers who treat employee feedback as decoration are running out of road. If loan officer headcount keeps contracting and lenders keep asking existing teams to absorb more volume rather than hiring at scale – a trend one veteran broker-owner says is already reshaping who survives the current down cycle – the gap between companies that listen and act versus companies that survey and shelve the results is not going to close on its own. It is going to widen, and it is going to get noticed.

KensieMae and Veterans United are not a template to copy line for line. They are proof of the same underlying bet, run at two different scales: a small remote firm can move on individual signals almost instantly, while a national lender has to build the benefit, the program, or the foundation that delivers the same feeling of being heard to thousands of people at once. Neither mechanism is optional if the goal is retention. Only the size of the company decides which one you need.

Strip away the perks, the founding dates, and the headcount, and this year’s best mortgage companies to work for in the US share exactly one thing: they treat employee feedback as an input, not an artifact. KensieMae turns that input into fast, direct, individual gestures. Veterans United Home Loans turns it into infrastructure built to reach a workforce it cannot manage one conversation at a time. Neither company is coasting on last year’s answer – both describe programs that have grown because employees kept telling them what mattered. In a mortgage industry running leaner and under more pressure than it has been in years, that refusal to let a survey go quiet is what separates a good employer from a top one.

Best Mortgage Companies to Work for in the US |
Top Mortgage Employers 

Methodology

The process of finding and recognizing the best employers in the US mortgage industry took place in two phases. First, MPA invited organizations to submit their details in a survey in which they described their offerings and business practices. Second, employees from nominated companies were asked to complete an anonymous survey rating their satisfaction across a number of key factors, including compensation, employee development, culture, and work environment. 

Each company was required to meet a minimum number of employee responses based on its size: 10 for companies with 10–100 employees, 20 for companies with 101–500 employees, and 50 for companies with 501 or more employees. Any company that achieved a satisfaction rating of 75 percent or greater was named a Top Mortgage Employer.