NATIONAL RURAL UTILITIES COOPERATIVE FINANCE CORP /DC/

The preparation of financial statements in conformity with U.S. GAAP requires management to make a number of judgments, estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amount of assets, liabilities, income and expenses in our consolidated financial statements. Understanding our accounting policies and the extent to which we use management’s judgment and estimates in applying these policies is integral to understanding our financial statements. We provide a discussion of our significant accounting policies in “Note 1—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies” in this Report.

Certain accounting estimates are considered critical because they involve significant judgments and assumptions about highly complex and inherently uncertain matters, and the use of reasonably different estimates and assumptions could have a material impact on our results of operations or financial condition. The determination of the allowance for expected credit losses over the remaining expected life of the loans in our loan portfolio involves a significant degree of management judgment and level of estimation uncertainty. As such, we have identified our accounting policy governing the estimation of the allowance for credit losses as a critical accounting estimate. Management established policies and control procedures intended to ensure that the methodology used for determining our allowance for credit losses, including any judgments and assumptions made as part of such method, are well controlled and applied consistently from period to period. We evaluate our critical accounting estimates and judgments required by our policies on an ongoing basis and update them as necessary based on changing conditions. We describe our allowance methodology and process for estimating the allowance for credit losses under “Note 1—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies—Allowance for Credit Losses—Loan Portfolio.”

We maintain an allowance based on a current estimate of credit losses that are expected to occur over the remaining life of the loans in our portfolio. The methods utilized to estimate the allowance for credit losses, key assumptions and quantitative and qualitative information considered by management in determining the appropriate allowance for credit losses are discussed in “Note 1—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies.”

Key inputs, such as our historical loss data and third-party default data, that we use in determining the appropriate allowance for credit losses are more readily quantifiable, while other inputs, such as our internally assigned borrower risk ratings that are intended to assess a borrower’s capacity to meet its financial obligations and provide information on the probability of default, require more qualitative judgment. Degrees of imprecision exist in each of these inputs due in part to subjective judgments involved and an inherent lag in the data available to quantify current conditions and events that may affect our credit loss estimate.

Our internally assigned borrower risk ratings serve as the primary credit quality indicator for our loan portfolio. We perform an annual comprehensive review of each of our borrowers, following the receipt of the borrower’s annual audited financial statements, to reassess the borrower’s risk rating. In addition, interim risk-rating adjustments may occur as a result of updated information affecting a borrower’s ability to fulfill its obligations or other significant developments and trends. Our Enterprise Risk Group and Corporate Credit Committee review and provide rigorous oversight and governance around our internally assigned risk ratings to ensure the ratings process is consis tent. This review involves an evaluation of the accuracy and timeliness of individual risk ratings and the overall effectiveness of our risk-rating framework relative to the risk profile of our credit exposures. While we have a robust risk-rating process, changes in our borrower risk ratings may not always directly coincide with changes in the risk profile of an individual borrower due to the timing of the rating process and a potential lag in the receipt of information necessary to evaluate the impact of emerging developments and current conditions on the risk ratings of our borrower. Although our allowance for credit losses is sensitive to each key input, shifts in the credit risk ratings of our borrowers generally have the most notable impact on our allowance for credit losses.

Key Assumptions

Determining the appropriateness of the allowance for credit losses is subject to numerous estimates and assumptions requiring significant management judgment about matters that involve a high degree of subjectivity and are difficult to predict. The key assumptions in determining our collective allowance that require significant management judgment and may have a material impact on the amount of the allowance include the segmentation of our loan portfolio; our internally assigned borrower risk ratings; the probability of default; the loss severity or recovery rate in the event of default for each portfolio segment; and management’s consideration of qualitative factors that may cause estimated credit losses associated with our existing loan portfolio to differ from our historical loss experience.

As discussed in “Credit Risk—Loan Portfolio Credit Risk,” CFC has experienced only 18 defaults in its 57-year history, and prior to the two CFC electric power supply loan defaults in fiscal years 2021 and 2022, we had no defaults in our electric utility loan portfolio since fiscal year 2013. As such, we have a limited history of defaults to develop reasonable and supportable estimated probability of default rates for our existing loan portfolio. We therefore utilize third-party default data for the utility sector as a proxy to estimate probability of default rates for our loan portfolio segments. However, we utilize our internal historical loss experience to estimate loss given default, or the recovery rate, for each of our loan portfolio segments. We believe our internal historical loss experience serves as a more reliable estimate of loss severity than third-party data due to the organizational structure and operating environment of rural utility cooperatives, our lending practice of generally requiring a senior security position on the assets and revenue of borrowers for long-term loans, the approach we take in working with borrowers that may be experiencing operational or financial issues and other factors discussed in “Credit Risk—Loan Portfolio Credit Risk.”

We generally consider nonaccrual loans as well as loans that have been modified with borrowers experiencing financial difficulty for individual evaluation given the risk characteristics of such loans and establish an asset-specific allowance for these loans. The key assumptions in determining our asset-specific allowance that require significant management judgment and may have a material impact on the amount of the allowance include measuring the amount and timing of future cash flows for individually evaluated loans that are not collateral-dependent and estimating the value of the underlying collateral for individually evaluated loans that are collateral-dependent.

The degree to which any particular assumption affects the allowance for credit losses depends on the severity of the change and its relationship to the other assumptions. We regularly evaluate the key inputs and assumptions used in determining the allowance for credit losses and update them, as necessary, to better reflect present conditions, including current trends in credit performance and borrower risk profile, portfolio concentration risk, changes in risk-management practices, changes in the regulatory environment and other factors relevant to our loan portfolio segments. We did not change our allowance methodology or the nature of the underlying key inputs and assumptions used in measuring our allowance for credit losses during FY2026.

Sensitivity Analysis

As noted above, our allowance for credit losses is sensitive to a variety of factors. While management uses its best judgment to assess loss data and other factors to determine the allowance for credit losses, changes in our loss assumptions, adjustments to assigned borrower risk ratings, the use of alternate external data sources or other factors could affect our estimate of probable credit losses inherent in the portfolio as of each balance sheet date, which would also impact the related provision for credit losses recognized in our consolidated statements of operations. For example, changes in the inputs below, without taking into consideration the impact of other potential offsetting or correlated inputs, would have the following effect on our allowance for credit losses as of May 31, 2026.

•A 10% increase or decrease in the default rates for all of our portfolio segments would result in a corresponding increase or decrease of approximately $3 million.

•A 1% increase or decrease in the recovery rates for all of our portfolio segments would result in a corresponding decrease or increase of approximately $10 million.

•A one-notch downgrade in the internal borrower risk ratings for our entire loan portfolio would result in an increase of approximately $38 million, while a one-notch upgrade would result in a decrease of approximately $17 million.

These sensitivity analyses are intended to provide an indication of the isolated impact of hypothetical alternative assumptions on our allowance for credit losses. Because management evaluates a variety of factors and inputs in determining the allowance for credit losses, these sensitivity analyses are not considered probable and do not imply an expectation of future changes in loss rates or borrower risk ratings. Given current processes employed in estimating the allowance for credit losses, management believes the inherent loss rates and currently assigned risk ratings are appropriate. It is possible that others performing the analyses, given the same information, may at any point in time reach different reasonable conclusions that could be significant to our consolidated financial statements.

We discuss the risks and uncertainties related to management’s judgments and estimates in applying accounting policies that have been identified as critical accounting estimates under “Item 1A. Risk Factors—Regulatory and Compliance Risks” in this Report. We provide additional information on the allowance for credit losses under the sections “Credit Risk—Allowance for Credit Losses” and “Note 5—Allowance for Credit Losses” in this Report.