Methodology and sources

Collection

Every series is retrieved from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED database, which redistributes the primary releases of the Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Treasury, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Optimal Blue. We do not survey lenders, we do not collect rate quotes, and we do not model or estimate any figure. The site is a presentation layer over public statistical releases.

The collector runs on a schedule and writes a dated observation set to disk. Pages are then generated from that file, so the figure you see and the date printed next to it always come from the same fetch. When a source is unreachable the previous good observation is retained and its original date is still displayed — the site will show you stale data labelled as stale, rather than fresh-looking data that is wrong.

The sources

• Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices — average rates on mortgages actually locked through Optimal Blue’s pricing engine, which covers a large share of U.S. originations. Published each business day with a one-day lag. These are transaction-based, which is why they move before any survey does.
• Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey — the weekly survey of lender offerings to a well-qualified borrower making a 20% down payment, published Thursdays. The longest continuous mortgage rate series in the United States and the figure most news coverage quotes.
• Federal Reserve G.19, Consumer Credit — average rates at commercial banks on auto loans, personal loans and credit card plans. Monthly for loans, quarterly for cards. Covers commercial banks only: credit unions and manufacturers’ captive finance arms are not in it.
• Federal Reserve H.15, Selected Interest Rates — the bank prime loan rate and the effective federal funds rate.
• U.S. Treasury — daily par yield curve rates, derived from closing market bid yields on actively traded Treasury securities.
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York — SOFR, the Secured Overnight Financing Rate.

How we compute changes

Changes are stated in basis points, where one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point. “Prior” compares the latest observation with the one immediately before it in the same series, whatever its frequency — the prior business day for a daily index, the prior week for the Freddie Mac survey, the prior month or quarter for the G.19 series. The one-month and one-year columns use the last observation on or before the date thirty and three hundred sixty-five days earlier, and the reference date actually used is shown on hover. The 52-week range covers observations in the trailing year, and the marker position shows where the current reading sits within it.

The mortgage spread is computed only on dates where both the mortgage index and the 10-year Treasury have an observation, so holidays and partial-settlement days are excluded rather than interpolated.

Known limitations

• Averages are not quotes. Nothing on this site predicts the rate a particular borrower will be offered. Credit profile, loan-to-value, debt-to-income, occupancy, property type, points paid and the individual lender all move a real quote away from the average.
• Publication lag varies. Mortgage indices are one business day behind. The prime rate series can run a week or more behind. G.19 consumer credit data can be six to ten weeks behind the period it describes. Every table states its observation date for this reason.
• Revisions happen. Statistical agencies revise. We re-fetch full series rather than appending, so a revised history is picked up automatically on the next run — which means a figure can change retroactively.
• Coverage is U.S. only, and commercial-bank consumer series exclude credit unions, which typically price below banks.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with the primary source, the primary source is right and we want to know. Every series row above links to its FRED page so you can check any number on this site in two clicks.