By Evan Sparks
For hundreds of years, black and gray Amish buggies have been familiar sights on the back roads of southeastern Pennsylvania, especially the rolling farm country around Lancaster. But these buggies — along with Amish markets, smorgasbords and furniture makers — are becoming familiar sights in many other spots across America.
While they are a small share of overall population — 410,000 in 2025, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College — their numbers have grown 131% from 177,000 in 2000. The Amish population doubles every 20 years, in large part due to large families and a total fertility rate of 6.1%, more than triple the U.S. average. Amish population growth has been fueled by high life expectancy and low rates of departure from the faith. And while Amish growth rates are unlikely to remain at current levels indefinitely, according to religion scholar Ryan Burge, the community is likely to grow.
And it is not growing only in its Pennsylvania heartland. Since large numbers of Amish are farmers, their growing families need new farmland, and land is expensive in southeast Pennsylvania. Amish settlements have spread out into northern New York, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania accounts for less than a quarter of the Amish population; Ohio is home to more than 86,000 Amish and Indiana to 67,000, nearly 1% of the state’s population — the highest share in any state. Amish settlements have spread as far as Idaho, Texas and Florida.
But while Amish populations remain small in the areas where they settle, they represent a new and especially important market for community banks.
To explain why, I turn to Bill O’Brien, chief lending officer at the Bank of Bird-in-Hand. (Its unusual name comes from its hometown, Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania.) The Bank of Bird-in-Hand was founded in 2013 to meet the needs of the Amish and Plain communities in Lancaster County. A wave of bank consolidation left the Lancaster area without as many community banks, and while larger banks were present, “There was obviously a need for bankers to understand the Plain and Amish communities,” O’Brien says.
Bank of Bird-in-Hand found immediate success because of pent-up demand for its type of community banking, O’Brien says. Lending to Amish businesses is different. “It’s not the traditional type of credit.” The deals tend to be in the $500,000-$1 million territory with a focus on small businesses and agricultural banking.
Amish businesses go well beyond farming, says Elmer King, a Bank of Bird-in-Hand client who runs a construction business. Growing up on a dairy farm, he knew as a child his future would be carpentry, since there wasn’t enough farmland in his area for him to take on the dairy business. “It just takes off. They know that business a mile deep, and it just grows and grows, and they get more family members involved,” he says.
When constructing or renovating a branch location, consideration must be taken to meet the needs of the Plain Community. Many of the bank’s branch buildings have bicycle and scooter parking, buggy ties and walk-up windows. Drive-through lanes are built to manage vehicles with four wheels and four legs. Bank of Bird-in-Hand continues to offer telephone banking and courier pick-up services. Photos courtesy of Bank of Bird-in-Hand.
What’s different about banking the Amish
The Amish are known for their low-tech lifestyle (see sidebar). “But I cannot sit here and say we don’t have any technology,” says King with a smile. “We do. But generally speaking, they try to hold back on that. They want to walk into a bank and talk to real people.”
“There’s a wide use of technology,” adds Lori Maley, president and CEO of Bank of Bird-in-Hand. “Some use remote deposit capture.” Bank of Bird-in-Hand became famous within banking circles in part because of its horse-and-buggy-equipped drive-through windows. More recently, it’s known for its Gelt Buses that bring banking services to remote areas. “We have all the products that you would need at whatever level of technology you want to get into,” says Maley. The Amish also tap into the modern payments system as merchants through their banks, accepting digital payments, adds O’Brien.
Contrary to what you might read on the internet, most Amish do have Social Security numbers (although they don’t usually participate in the retirement savings system). But there are other obstacles to standard approaches to bank credit. For example, Amish wives often have no credit score, and men’s credit scores may be of limited value due to greater use of cash within the community. O’Brien says the bank’s credit policy has developed over time to account for the realities in their community. “If you don’t have a credit score, that’s not a denial.” The credit policy encompasses business performance and profitability, use of a checking account.
Bank of Bird-in-Hand opened its doors in 2013 in the heart of Lancaster County’s Plain Community, in the quaint village of Bird-in-Hand. At the time, they were the first bank to gain a charter since 2010 and remain the only bank in Pennsylvania to open since 2008.
“I saw a young guy the other day, 22 years old. And he’d saved $62,000. I don’t care if I’d never see a credit report on him,” O’Brien chuckles. “If you think about when I was 20, I’d have 62 bucks.”
The credit policy also accounts for the Amish community’s mutual self-insurance, in which individual districts insure each other against losses to collateral. And speaking of losses, “We’ve never had a significant loss,” on loans to Amish borrowers, says O’Brien. “I would put our credit quality up against any bank.”
Opportunities for community banks
In recent decades, community banks have found themselves squeezed on technology costs, legacy core systems and regulatory burdens while competing with larger banks, tax-exempt credit unions, nonbank fintech providers and even crypto companies. For some small banks in rural areas that are seeing Amish growth, this demographic shift may be a critical opportunity to build a business model where large institutions and fintech apps struggle to compete — a business built on handshake deals, character lending, flexible credit policies and in-person service. As community banks plot their path to long-term thriving, finding niches where they are the strongest competitors is one key strategy.
WHO ARE THE AMISH?
The Amish are a group of linked ethnic and religious communities that originated in Germany and began migrating to America in the 18th century. Their theological heritage comes from Protestant reformer Menno Simons (the namesake of the Mennonites, a group related to the Amish in theology and plain living), who founded the Anabaptist movement. Amish religious views — which include pacifism, pietism, simple living and a withdrawal from corrupting influences of the modern world — inform their practices. The term “Plain” is often used to describe the overarching group of Amish and traditionalist Mennonites who maintain a separate lifestyle.
There is a wide variety of groupings within the Amish community, including Old Order Amish (the most numerous), New Order Amish and Beachy Amish (whose doctrines allow them to drive cars). Even within Amish groupings, different communities’ religious leaders allow different kinds of technology. Almost all Amish are permitted to use washing machines, for example, and almost none but the Beachy are permitted cars. Use of farm equipment and communication technology like landline phones varies depending on the community. Many Amish communities continue to speak “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a German dialect, and they refer to non-Amish as “English.”
Bank of Bird-in-Hand’s Gelt Bus fleet serves 17 locations across five counties of South Central Pennsylvania. These fully-equipped RVs feature an ATM, teller window, lobby area and office space to provide banking services to the most rural areas of the community. These mobile branches get their name from the Pennsylvania Dutch word for “money.”
But success with the Amish and Plain communities doesn’t happen overnight. King points out one critical ingredient for any bank seeking to engage the Amish: personal knowledge. “Bill has been with this culture in this community for 40 years,” he says. “Bill knows more Amish people than I do, and that’s a fact. The amount of trust that they build up over the years, with the community and the people that he knows, is phenomenal. Another bank is going to be challenged to mirror what these guys have done.” For O’Brien, it took “humility, some curiosity and desire to know your client, to know what’s going on with them” — including several lunches with them at the famous Shady Maple smorgasbord.
O’Brien also notes that differences among Amish settlements may make what works in Lancaster County different from what would work in Indiana or Kentucky. Some of the newer settlements are still getting established and don’t have farms and businesses that operate as profitably as in Pennsylvania. And Amish orders aren’t all the same across geographies — differing down to the colors of carriages and shapes of hats.
King’s business was with a large regional bank for decades before Bank of Bird-in-Hand was founded, and when he compares “the time that it takes to do the whole process, how easy it is and the trust, there’s no comparison.”
Evan Sparks is editor-in-chief of the ABA Banking Journal.
