PROVIDENT FINANCIAL HOLDINGS INC

Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm

To the Stockholders and the Board of Directors of Provident Financial Holdings, Inc.

Opinion on the Financial Statements

We have audited the accompanying consolidated statements of financial condition of Provident Financial Holdings, Inc. and subsidiary (the “Corporation”) as of June 30, 2026, and 2025, the related consolidated statements of operations, comprehensive income, stockholders’ equity, and cash flows, for each of the two years in the period ended June 30, 2026, and the related (collectively referred to as the “financial statements”). In our opinion, the financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Corporation as of June 30, 2026, and 2025, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the two years in the period ended June 30, 2026, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

Basis for Opinion

These financial statements are the responsibility of the Corporation’s management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Corporation’s financial statements based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB) and are required to be independent with respect to the Corporation in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. The Corporation is not required to have, nor were we engaged to perform, an audit of its internal control over financial reporting. As part of our audits, we are required to obtain an understanding of internal control over financial reporting but not for the purpose of expressing an opinion on the effectiveness of the Corporation’s internal control over financial reporting. Accordingly, we express no such opinion.

Our audits included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

Critical Audit Matter

The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current-period audit of the financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that (1) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.

Allowance for Credit Losses - Refer to Notes 1 and 3 to the Financial Statements

Critical Audit Matter Description

Management estimates the Corporation’s allowance for credit losses (“ACL”) and calculates the quantitative portion of the collectively evaluated allowance using a historical loss rate methodology based primarily on the Corporation’s historical net charge-off experience. The collectively evaluated allowance is based on a pooling method for groups of homogeneous loans sharing similar loan characteristics to calculate an allowance which reflects an estimate of lifetime expected credit losses using historical experience, current conditions, and reasonable and supportable forecasts. The Corporation primarily utilizes historical loss rates for the ACL based on its own specific historical losses and/or with peer loss history where applicable. The expected loss rates are applied to expected monthly loan balances estimated through the consideration of contractual repayment terms and expected prepayments. The prepayment assumptions applied to expected cash flow over the contractual life of the loans are estimated based on historical and bank-specific experience and the consideration of current and expected conditions and circumstances including the level of interest rates. Management considers whether additional or reduced allowance levels on collectively evaluated loans may be warranted, given the consideration of a variety of qualitative factors. The qualitative portion of the Corporation’s allowance on collectively evaluated loans are calculated using management’s judgment, to determine risk categorizations in each of the qualitative factors. The amount of qualitative allowance is also contingent upon the relative weighting of the qualitative factors according to management’s judgment.

We identified the ACL as a critical audit matter because of the complexity of the Company’s model and the significant assumptions used by management. Auditing the collectively evaluated loans of the Corporation’s ACL, specifically for single-family, multi-family and commercial real estate loans, involved significant judgment. Given the management judgments required for the determination of historical loss rates, prepayment assumptions, reasonable and supportable forecasts, current conditions and relative weighting of qualitative factors, performing audit procedures to evaluate the ACL requires a high degree of auditor judgment and an increased extent of effort, including the need to involve our credit specialists.

How the Critical Audit Matter Was Addressed in the Audit

Our audit procedures related to the ACL included the following, among others:

/s/Deloitte & Touche LLP

Costa Mesa, California

September 2, 2026

We have served as the Corporation's auditor since 2001.