Line
The Mortgage Rate Lock-In
Average rate on all outstanding mortgages (end of quarter) and the Freddie Mac 30-year fixed rate (quarterly average), %
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Average rate on outstanding mortgages · Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 1 year
Continuation isn't available for Market rate (30-year fixed): The projection ends inside the latest period this chart plots.
Dashed: the projection from the latest reading. Shaded: the range about two in three outcomes land in. A projection, not a promise.
Federal Housing Finance Agency, National Mortgage Database: first-lien residential mortgages open at the end of each quarter, a one-in-twenty sample of mortgages in credit files, shares by number of loans. Market rate: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, averaged over each quarter; the newest quarter averages the weeks published so far. The lock-in gap chart is the market rate less the outstanding average.
What a new mortgage costs against what the typical existing borrower pays. For a decade the two sat close together; since 2022 the market rate has run far above the rate on the stock of loans, and that gap is the cost of moving.
What this chart reads
- Average Interest Rate on Outstanding U.S. Mortgages · %as “Average rate on outstanding mortgages”latest 2026-04-01
- 30-Year Mortgage Rateas “Market rate (30-year fixed)”latest 2026-10-22
Sources
Average Interest Rate on Outstanding U.S. Mortgages · %. Source: Federal Housing Finance Agency, National Mortgage Database (NMDB®) aggregate statistics, outstanding residential mortgage statistics, national, quarterly (https://www.fhfa.gov/document/d/nmdb/nmdb-outstanding-mortgage-statistics-national-census-areas-quarterly.zip); data dictionary and technical notes 2026Q1. NMDB is a joint FHFA and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau program; FHFA publishes these aggregates. U.S. government work: "information and materials produced by Federal agencies, including FHFA, are in the public domain" (fhfa.gov website policy). Read weekly.
30-Year Mortgage Rate. Source: Freddie Mac publishes the Primary Mortgage Market Survey based on applications from lenders nationwide. Palanor pulls this series from the FRED API nightly.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.