Mortgage

Your mortgage rate is not a single market price. It is the output of a pricing model: a baseline set by the bond market, adjusted for your credit profile, your loan-to-value ratio, the loan product, the property type, and how the lender is pricing its own pipeline that week. Two borrowers can get quotes half a point apart on the same day for the same house. Understanding which inputs you control is the difference between accepting a rate and shopping one.

This topic covers what actually determines the number. The Federal Reserve does not set mortgage rates directly; it sets short-term policy rates, and mortgage pricing tracks longer-dated Treasury yields with a spread that widens and narrows on its own. Discount points buy the rate down at a known cost, which makes the decision a breakeven calculation you can do in two minutes rather than a judgment call. Temporary buydowns move cost around in time instead of removing it. Fixed and adjustable products distribute rate risk differently, and the caps in an adjustable note tell you exactly how bad the worst case is allowed to get.

We also cover the comparison discipline that saves the most money and gets skipped the most often: quote the same product, same term, same down payment, same lock period from several lenders, and compare the full loan estimate rather than the headline rate, because origination and lender fees can erase a quarter-point advantage. Current benchmark mortgage rates on this site come from the Federal Reserve Economic Data series, and every rate figure we publish carries the date it was pulled — a rate without a date is not a rate.