The Yield Curve in 2024

The whole curve in 2024

A single year's curve is best read maturity by maturity, and the interactive chart above lets you hover any point on it. In broad strokes, 2024 opened at the short end with three-month bills near 5.14% and the two-year note around 4.38%, rose through the belly of the curve to the 4.24% ten-year benchmark, and reached out to roughly 4.43% on the thirty-year long bond. That is a span of about -0.71 points from the shortest bills to the longest bond — an unusually flat-to-inverted shape, the long end offering little or no extra yield over the short end.

The short end versus the long end

The two halves of the curve are driven by different forces. The short end — the 3-month bill at 5.14% and the 2-year note at 4.38% in 2024 — moves with the Federal Reserve's policy rate and with expectations for where it's headed. The long end — the 10-year at 4.24% and the 30-year at 4.43% — is set more by the market's view of long-run growth and inflation. When the Fed is hiking aggressively, the short end can climb above the long end, and the curve inverts. In 2024 the 10-year sat -0.90 relative to the 3-month bill — below it, so even the Fed's preferred 10y−3mo gauge was inverted.

What the 2024 curve signaled

Short-term yields eased as the Fed began cutting rates, and the long-inverted 2-year/10-year curve moved back toward normal.

Across 2024 the 10-year Treasury averaged 4.24% and the 2-year 4.38%, leaving the 10y−2y spread at -0.14. That put the curve into inversion — short-term yields above long-term ones — for 7 of the year's months, as deep as -0.39. An inversion like this is the bond market's way of signaling it expects the Fed to be cutting rates before long, usually because it sees the economy weakening. Measured by how deep it got, 2024 ranks 3rd of the 17 years on record.

The 10-year's path through 2024

The benchmark 10-year didn't sit still during the year. It climbed, moving from about 3.99% at the start of 2024 to 4.58% by year-end, and traded between roughly 3.81% and 4.69% along the way. For anyone shopping for a mortgage that year, those swings mattered: the 30-year fixed is priced off the 10-year, so its rise and fall showed up in home-loan quotes within weeks. See exactly what mortgage rates did in 2024.

2024: -0.14

-1.06 deepest inversion (June 2023) +2.84 steepest (January 2011)

How 2024 compares with today — and its own decade

The 10-year sits at about 4.38% today, so 2024's 4.24% was below the current level — the 2nd-highest of the 17 years in this record. The spread has since moved to +0.28, so the curve is back to its normal upward slope. Within the 2020s, the 10-year averaged about 3.15%, and 2024 ran above its own decade. A year earlier, in 2023, the 10-year averaged 3.97% with a -0.63 spread. The following year, 2025, it held to 4.24%.

The curve doesn't move on its own — it's driven by the Fed at the short end and by growth and inflation expectations at the long end. See what the Fed's policy rate did in 2024, and how mortgage rates moved in 2024 as a result.

This is one year of the story. For the whole picture — every month since 2010, the great 2022–2024 inversion, today's curve and what it all signals — see the US Treasury yield curve, 2010–today.