U.S. Mortgage Lenders Are 73% More Likely to Deny Gay Borrowers

Gay couples are a lot less likely to be approved for a home loan, and they pay more for the mortgages they do get, according to a new analysis of more than 30 million U.S. home loans from 1990 to 2015.

Same-sex partners were 73 percent more likely to be denied a loan than male-female couples with the same financial profile, according to the study by Iowa State University’s Ivy College of Business. The higher fees, an average of 0.2 percentage points, are small for individual borrowers but add up to as much as $86 million a year, according to ...