The Closing Leak: How Late-Caught Tolerance Cures Eat Into Your Margin
Tolerance cures are one of the most consistently preventable costs in mortgage lending, and they're also one of the most common. An ICE Mortgage Technology study of nearly 90,000 loans across eight lenders found fee cures occur on more than one in three loans, averaging $1,225 in lender-paid cures per loan. Scaled across production, that's more than $1.2 million recoverable for every 1,000 loans closed, money that's already been lost by the time anyone notices.
What Is a Tolerance Cure, Exactly?
Under TRID, fees fall into tolerance categories: some can't increase at all between the Loan Estimate and the Closing Disclosure, some can increase up to 10% in aggregate, and some carry no cap. When actual costs exceed what was disclosed beyond the allowed tolerance, the lender has to reimburse the borrower for the difference, a payment known as a fee cure. It's a compliance requirement, not optional, and it comes directly out of the lender's margin on that file.
Why Do Cures Happen on More Than a Third of Loans?
The categories most prone to cures tend to be the ones with moving parts late in the process: recording fees and transfer taxes that vary by jurisdiction, title and settlement fees that can shift once final numbers come in, services where the actual invoice doesn't match the original estimate. None of these are unusual scenarios. They're the normal friction of coordinating between a lender and a title company on numbers that keep moving until the very end. The cure doesn't happen because a fee changed, it happens because the change wasn't caught and corrected before the final Closing Disclosure went out.
Why Does This Keep Getting Caught Too Late?
Balancing a Closing Disclosure against title figures is detailed, line-by-line work, and it competes for attention with everything else happening in the days before a scheduled closing. When that balancing gets treated as a final check rather than an ongoing one, discrepancies that could have been caught and resolved days earlier only surface once the CD is already being finalized, at which point a cure is often the only option left instead of a correction.
What Actually Fixes This?
Not better software alone, and not a last-minute review the day before closing. The fix is a dedicated specialist doing careful, ongoing balancing against title figures throughout the closing process, not just once at the end, catching a fee discrepancy while there's still time to resolve it cleanly instead of absorbing it as a cure.
See the full role breakdown → What Does a Mortgage Closing Specialist Do?
How BrokerVA Plugs This Leak
BrokerVA's Closing Specialists are directly employed staff trained specifically on CD balancing and tolerance cure prevention, reviewing figures against title on an ongoing basis rather than treating it as a one-time check before closing. Because this role sits directly before funding in our pipeline, a discrepancy caught here never turns into a cure that eats into margin, and never reaches disbursement unresolved.
Frequently Asked Questions
What triggers a tolerance cure? A tolerance cure happens when actual closing costs exceed what was disclosed on the Loan Estimate beyond the allowed tolerance threshold. Categories most prone to this include recording fees, transfer taxes, and title or settlement services where final invoices can shift late in the process.
How much do tolerance cures typically cost? Industry research puts the average lender-paid cure at $1,225 per affected loan, occurring on more than one in three loans studied, which adds up to significant recoverable cost across a lender's full production volume.
Can tolerance cures be prevented entirely? Most can be caught and resolved before the final Closing Disclosure is issued with consistent, ongoing balancing against title figures throughout the process, rather than a single review right before closing.
Stop paying for cures you could have caught. Contact us.