Today’s 15-year mortgage rate

What the number above means

The rate at the top of the page is the national average for a brand-new 15-year fixed-rate mortgage, drawn from Freddie Mac’s weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey and refreshed through the day. It represents what a well-qualified borrower — good credit, a solid down payment, a standard conforming loan — is being offered across a broad sample of lenders. Treat it as the market’s temperature, not a personal quote. Your own rate is built on top of this average and moves with your credit score, the size of your down payment, the loan amount, the property type and even the state you’re buying in. Two people shopping on the same day can be quoted rates a fraction of a point apart, and both can differ from the headline here.

One thing you can count on: the 15-year rate above will sit below the 30-year rate on the same day — usually somewhere between half a percentage point and a full point lower. What the average is genuinely good for is direction and context. It tells you whether rates are drifting up, easing off, or holding, and the “this week” change beside the number shows the latest move. Watch it over a few weeks and you get a feel for the trend that no single lender quote can give you — exactly what you want when you’re deciding whether to lock, or whether the shorter term still fits your budget.

What a 15-year fixed mortgage actually is

A 15-year fixed-rate mortgage is a home loan you repay in equal monthly installments over 180 months, at an interest rate that never changes for the life of the loan. Like its 30-year cousin, the rate is locked from day one, so your principal-and-interest payment in year 14 is identical to the one in month one, no matter what inflation, the Federal Reserve or the wider economy do in between. What sets the 15-year apart is compression: you’re promising to clear the entire balance in half the usual time.

That compression reshapes the whole loan. Because the term is short, lenders charge a lower rate — their money is exposed to less time and less risk. And because you’re repaying the principal twice as fast, the share of each payment that goes to principal rather than interest is far higher from the very first month. On a 30-year loan the early years are almost all interest, so equity crawls; on a 15-year loan you make real dents in the balance from the start, and the crossover point where most of your payment goes to principal arrives years earlier. The result is a loan that builds equity quickly and costs a fraction of the lifetime interest of a 30-year term. The price you pay for all of that is a substantially larger monthly payment, because the same principal is squeezed into 180 payments instead of 360. There is also a qualifying wrinkle: because the required payment is larger, lenders count more of your income against it, so a 15-year loan can shrink the maximum price you qualify for even when the rate is lower. The 15-year is, in short, the disciplined saver’s mortgage: it forces fast payoff and rewards you with a lower rate and a much smaller total interest bill, provided your budget can carry the payment every month without strain.

15-year versus 30-year: the core trade-off

The choice between a 15-year and a 30-year fixed is the single biggest decision in structuring a mortgage, and it comes down to three linked numbers: the rate, the monthly payment, and the total interest. On rate, the 15-year wins — it’s almost always the cheaper headline number, typically around half a point to a full point below the 30-year, because the lender’s money is tied up for half as long. On monthly payment, the 30-year wins decisively — spreading repayment over 360 months keeps the required payment low, while the 15-year’s 180-month schedule pushes the payment sharply higher even at the lower rate. On total interest, the 15-year wins again, and it isn’t close: the combination of a lower rate and half the number of years means you often pay less than half the lifetime interest.

A useful way to think about it: the 30-year buys you a low, flexible required payment and the option to pay extra when you can; the 15-year forces disciplined, fast payoff in exchange for a higher mandatory payment. Neither is universally “better.” The 15-year is superb if your income comfortably covers the larger payment and you value owning free and clear sooner. But a payment you must make is riskier than one you choose to make — if money gets tight on a 15-year loan, you’re still on the hook for the full amount, whereas a 30-year borrower who was voluntarily overpaying can simply drop back to the minimum. Some buyers split the difference: they take the 30-year for the safety of the lower required payment, then make extra principal payments to shorten it in practice. The early payoff calculator shows how close that gets you to a true 15-year payoff, and the mortgage calculator lets you put both terms side by side.

What actually moves the 15-year rate

The most common myth in personal finance is that the Federal Reserve sets mortgage rates. It doesn’t — at least not directly, and not the 15-year. The Fed sets the overnight federal funds rate, a rate banks charge each other for one night. Fixed mortgages are multi-year commitments, so they track a longer-term benchmark: the 10-year Treasury yield. When the 10-year yield rises, fixed mortgage rates rise with it; when it falls, they follow, usually within days. The 15-year keys off the same Treasury benchmark as the 30-year, which is why the two move up and down almost in lockstep — the 15-year simply sits a notch lower, reflecting the shorter term and lower risk to the lender.

Underneath the 10-year yield sit two forces. The first is inflation: lenders won’t lock money away at a rate that inflation will erode, so hot inflation pushes long yields — and mortgages — up, while cooling inflation lets them fall. The second is demand for mortgage-backed securities, the bonds your loan gets bundled into and sold to investors. When investors are hungry for that safe, steady income, they accept lower yields and rates drift down; when they pull back, rates climb. The Fed still matters, because its rate decisions and bond-buying shape the whole environment those securities trade in — but the tight, day-to-day link is to Treasuries, not the Fed’s headline rate. That’s why you’ll sometimes see the 15-year rate drop in a week the Fed never met, or climb even after a widely cheered Fed cut.

Who the 15-year suits — and who it doesn’t

The 15-year fixed rewards a specific kind of borrower. If you have stable, reliable income and enough monthly room to carry the larger payment without strain, the loan is hard to beat: you get a lower rate, a much smaller total interest bill, and you own your home outright years sooner. It’s especially attractive to buyers who are a decade or two from retirement and don’t want a mortgage payment following them into their seventies, to people refinancing from a 30-year loan who want to slash their interest cost while rates are favorable, and to anyone whose priority is being debt-free over maximizing monthly cash flow.

It’s a poor fit in the opposite circumstances. If the higher payment would leave you cash-poor, crowd out retirement contributions, thin your emergency fund, or stretch your budget to the edge, the 15-year’s discipline turns into fragility. Remember that the bigger payment is mandatory, not optional — a job loss, medical bill or income dip hits harder when your required payment is high. For many buyers, the wiser route is a 30-year loan with a required payment they can always cover, plus voluntary extra principal in good months. That captures much of the 15-year’s payoff speed while keeping a safety valve. Use the home affordability calculator to see which term your income genuinely supports before committing to the shorter one.

Today’s rate in historical context

A single number means more once you can place it. Freddie Mac has tracked the 15-year fixed in its weekly survey since 1991 — two decades after it began publishing the 30-year in 1971 — and over that stretch the rate has swung widely. Its record high in the series was 8.89% in December 1994, a period of rising rates when even the shorter, cheaper term crossed into the high single digits. Its record low came far more recently: 2.10% in July 2021, during the pandemic, when the Fed slashed rates and bought bonds on a massive scale and 15-year borrowers could lock in some of the cheapest home financing in American history. The spread between those two extremes — nearly seven percentage points — is a reminder of how much the environment matters: a borrower in 1994 and a borrower in 2021 took out the same product on wildly different terms, and the difference in lifetime interest between them ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars on an otherwise identical loan. Against that range, wherever today’s 15-year rate sits, you can gauge whether it’s cheap, expensive, or middling by history’s standards. For the full picture, our historical mortgage-rate study charts the series year by year and breaks the story down decade by decade.

What today’s rate means for your payment

A rate is abstract until it becomes a monthly number, and on a 15-year loan that number is the whole story — it’s what makes the term either a smart bargain or a budget-buster. The principal-and-interest payment rises with both the rate and the amount borrowed, but the compressed 180-month schedule is what really drives it up. As a rough guide at rates near today’s, every $100,000 borrowed on a 15-year term costs meaningfully more per month than the same $100,000 on a 30-year term, even though the 15-year rate is lower — often several hundred dollars more for a typical loan size. That extra monthly outlay is the entire trade: it’s the price of paying off the loan in half the time and saving a small fortune in interest along the way. Before you commit, stress-test the payment against a lean month rather than an average one — the shorter term is only a bargain if you can make the payment every single time.

The reason to run the exact math rather than eyeball it is that the payment difference between the two terms is large enough to change what house you can afford. Drop today’s headline rate into the mortgage calculator to see the full 15-year payment with property taxes and homeowners insurance, then compare it against the 30-year to feel the gap in required payment against the gap in lifetime interest. Use the home affordability calculator to work backward from your income to the price a 15-year payment supports, the early payoff calculator to see how a 30-year loan with extra payments stacks up against a true 15-year, and — if you already own — the refinance calculator to test whether switching from a 30-year to a 15-year makes sense at today’s rate.

Related tools and guides

This page is the live number and the context; the tools turn it into your numbers. Start with the mortgage calculator for the full monthly payment on a 15-year term, the affordability calculator for the price your income supports, and the early payoff calculator to weigh a 15-year loan against a 30-year with extra principal. If you already have a mortgage, the refinance calculator shows whether shortening your term pays off. For the long view of where today’s rate sits, read the historical mortgage-rate study, compare it against the 30-year rate, and check the rest of the today’s rates board — especially the 10-year Treasury, which is what your mortgage rate is really following. This page is general information, not financial advice.