Today’s 30-year mortgage rate

What the number above means

The rate at the top of the page is the national average for a brand-new 30-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 half a point apart, and both can differ from the headline here.

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, which is exactly what you want when you’re deciding whether to lock.

What a 30-year fixed mortgage actually is

A 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is a home loan you repay in equal monthly installments over 360 months, at an interest rate that never changes for the life of the loan. That fixed rate is the whole appeal: your principal-and-interest payment on day one is the same in year 28, no matter what happens to inflation, the Federal Reserve or the wider economy. It’s the default American mortgage for a reason — the long term keeps the monthly payment low and predictable, which is what makes a given house affordable.

The trade-off is total interest. Stretching repayment over three decades means you pay far more interest over the life of the loan than you would on a shorter term, and you build equity slowly in the early years, when almost all of each payment goes to interest rather than principal. That’s the bargain: the lowest monthly payment of any mainstream mortgage, bought with the highest lifetime interest cost. Whether that’s the right deal depends on your budget and how long you’ll keep the loan — which is precisely what the calculators lower down help you test.

What actually moves the 30-year rate

The most common myth in personal finance is that the Federal Reserve sets mortgage rates. It doesn’t — at least not directly. The Fed sets the overnight federal funds rate, a rate banks charge each other for one night. Fixed mortgages, by contrast, are 30-year commitments, so they track a long-term benchmark: the 10-year Treasury yield. When the 10-year yield rises, mortgage rates rise with it; when it falls, they follow, usually within days. The gap between the two — the “spread” — is the margin lenders add to cover their costs, the risk you refinance or default, and their profit. It typically runs somewhere between 1.5 and 3 percentage points and widens when the market is nervous.

Underneath the 10-year yield sit two forces. The first is inflation: lenders won’t lock money away for 30 years 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 mortgage rates drop in a week the Fed never met, or climb even after a widely cheered Fed cut.

Today’s rate in historical context

A single number means more once you can place it. Over the half-century Freddie Mac has tracked the 30-year fixed, the rate has swung enormously. Its all-time high was 18.63% in October 1981, when the Fed under Paul Volcker drove interest rates to punishing levels to break the double-digit inflation of the era — a mortgage more than four times as expensive as anything most buyers today have seen. Its record low came four decades later: 2.65% in January 2021, during the pandemic, when the Fed slashed rates and bought bonds on a massive scale. Against that range, today’s rate sits in the middle third — high compared with the freakishly cheap money of 2020–2021, but well below the historical norms of the 1980s and 1990s, and roughly in line with the long-run average across the whole series. For the full picture, our historical mortgage-rate study charts every year since 1971 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. The principal-and-interest payment on a 30-year loan rises with both the rate and the amount borrowed. As a rough rule at rates near today’s, every $100,000 borrowed costs in the neighborhood of $600 to $650 a month in principal and interest. So a $400,000 loan lands somewhere around $2,500 a month, and a $300,000 loan around $1,900 — before you add property taxes, homeowners insurance and, if your down payment is under 20%, private mortgage insurance (PMI). Those extras can add several hundred dollars, which is why the “sticker” payment your lender quotes is always higher than the raw principal-and-interest figure.

The reason to run the exact math rather than eyeball it is that small rate moves compound over 360 payments. Half a percentage point on a $400,000 loan is roughly $120 a month — about $43,000 over the life of the loan. Drop today’s headline rate into the mortgage calculator to see the full payment with taxes and insurance, use the home affordability calculator to work backward from your income to the price this rate supports, and if you’re weighing renting a while longer, the rent vs. buy calculator finds the point where buying wins.

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

The 30-year fixed isn’t the only option. The 15-year fixed carries a lower rate — lenders reward the shorter commitment — and because you repay in half the time, you pay dramatically less total interest. The catch is the monthly payment, which is much higher, since you’re cramming the same principal into 180 payments instead of 360. The 30-year buys you a low, flexible payment and the option to pay extra when you can; the 15-year forces disciplined, fast payoff at a higher monthly cost. Many buyers take the 30-year for the safety of the lower required payment, then make occasional extra principal payments to shorten it in practice — the early payoff calculator shows how much that strategy saves.

Lock, float, and how to act on the rate

Once you’re actually shopping, the headline rate turns into a decision: lock it in now, or float and hope it falls before you close. A rate lock freezes your quoted rate for a set window — commonly 30 to 60 days — so a mid-process spike can’t raise your payment. Floating leaves you exposed to the bond market until closing. The honest framing is that floating is a bet: it only pays off if rates drop before your closing date, and no one can reliably predict that. If today’s rate makes your target payment work, locking removes real risk, and you keep the upside anyway — because if rates fall meaningfully after you close, you can refinance. Watch this page for the trend, get quotes from more than one lender on the same day (the average here tells you whether a quote is competitive), and lock when the number works for your budget rather than trying to time the exact bottom.

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, the affordability calculator for the price your income supports, and the down payment calculator to see how much to put down and how PMI factors in. For the long view of where today’s rate sits, read the historical mortgage-rate study, 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.