About FedRate

FedRate charts United States interest rates and works out what today's rates mean for a monthly mortgage payment. It exists because those two things are usually kept apart: rate history lives in economic data portals, and payment calculators quote a number without showing where the rate came from.

Where the data comes from

Every rate on this site is published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis through FRED. Three series are used: the daily federal funds effective rate (DFF), which the Federal Reserve sets and which reaches back to 1954, and Freddie Mac's weekly 30-year and 15-year fixed mortgage averages (MORTGAGE30US and MORTGAGE15US).

Nothing is estimated, modelled or filled in. If a figure is not published, it is not shown — there is no 20-year fixed series on this site because neither Freddie Mac nor Optimal Blue publishes one, and no adjustable-rate series because the 5/1 ARM average was discontinued in November 2022.

The data refreshes daily. Our server pulls the full history of each series once every 24 hours and serves every chart from that snapshot, so your browser never contacts FRED and the site keeps working if the St. Louis Fed is unreachable. The federal funds rate is published each business day; the mortgage averages are surveyed weekly and released on Thursdays, so those two figures will often carry different dates.

How the calculator works

Payments use the standard amortising formula, and the schedule is walked month by month rather than approximated — so the final payment is correctly short, PMI stops at the point the balance reaches 80% of the property value, and extra principal shortens the term instead of being averaged away.

The refinance comparison derives the remaining term of your existing loan from its original amount and today's balance, and compares against that term rather than the new one. Refinancing a loan with twenty years left into a fresh thirty lowers the payment partly by re-extending it, and folding that into "savings" would overstate the case for switching.

What it is not

It is not advice, and it is not a quote. The rates shown are national averages reported after the fact; the rate any particular borrower is offered depends on credit, lender, location, loan type and the day. Treat the figures here as a way to understand the shape of a decision, then confirm the numbers with a lender.