Mortgage Rates
National 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates
Fact Checked
Today's National 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates
Compare Interest Rate, APR, Monthly Payment, and Total Interest Cost
The 30-year fixed is priced differently by every loan program. Conventional, FHA, VA and jumbo all lend the same money for the same 360 months, and all four quote a different number for it. The table below holds the loan amount constant and lets only the program vary, so the interest rate, the APR and the monthly principal-and-interest payment are directly comparable. Read the APR column beside the rate column: the rate sets your payment, but the APR is the figure that carries the fees, and on a loan this long a small difference in either compounds into a large one.
30-Year Fixed Rates by Loan Program
LIVERates last updated: Aug 26, 2026
- Today's 30-Year Rates
- What These Rates Assume
- vs National Average
- Who Should Choose 30 Years
- 30 vs 15 Calculator
- What Affects Your Rate
- FAQ
What These Rates Assume
Every rate table is built on an assumed borrower, and almost none of them say who that borrower is. Ours does. The quotes above are GoRealo's own lender pricing for a single-family primary residence, on a purchase, at the standard published tier for each program. They are national rates, and GoRealo is licensed to lend in Florida, so Florida is where we can actually lock them.
The assumptions behind the table, stated plainly.
- One loan amount, four programs. The payment column prices every program against the same loan, which is what makes the rates comparable. It is not an eligibility statement. A loan that size is below the conforming limit, so the jumbo row prices jumbo money against a conforming-sized balance: treat it as the price of the rate, not as an available jumbo scenario.
- The payment is principal and interest only. It excludes property taxes, homeowners insurance, HOA dues and mortgage insurance. FHA charges a mortgage insurance premium for the life of most loans, so the FHA row shows a low rate and an understated monthly cost. Its APR is the honest column.
- The conventional row is the standard tier, not the best one. Conventional 30-year pricing is banded by credit score and loan-to-value, and the rate shown is the un-banded published rate rather than the cheapest band we carry. See what affects your rate.
- VA is usually the lowest APR here, and most readers cannot use it. It is restricted to eligible veterans, service members and surviving spouses.
National 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates vs National Average Locked 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates
Compare Same-Term APR, Monthly Payment, Buying Power, and Total Interest Cost for National Borrowers
A national average locked rate is not an advertised rate and not a survey answer. It is the average rate on mortgages that borrowers actually locked with lenders on the previous business day. The benchmark below comes from the Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices, which are built from roughly 35% of all US mortgage transactions, so it is a record of what people were really charged rather than what they were offered. Comparing a lender's quote against it, on the same 30-year term and the same loan, is the only comparison that means anything.
Payment Difference
On a 30-year fixed, a rate difference of a quarter of a point is worth roughly $15 a month per $100,000 borrowed. That is small enough to ignore when you are choosing a house and large enough to matter for 360 consecutive months, which is the whole difficulty with comparing mortgage rates: the monthly stakes look trivial and the lifetime stakes do not.
Total Interest Savings
Multiply that same quarter point across the full term and it is worth thousands of dollars per $100,000 borrowed, before any of it is discounted back to today. Total interest cost, not the monthly payment, is where a rate advantage is actually collected, and it is the number a payment-first comparison hides.
Payoff Timeline
A lower rate does not shorten a 30-year loan, it lowers the payment. The term only shortens if you keep paying the higher amount, in which case the difference goes to principal. That is the mechanism behind every "pay it off early" strategy, and it is worth knowing that the standard note gives you the right to do it for nothing. See who should choose a 30-year fixed.
GoRealo 30-Year Fixed vs National Average Locked Rates
LIVERates last updated: --
Select the 30-yr term filter to hold the comparison to this page's term. Two cautions before you read a saving off it. The market side of the comparison publishes a rate, not a fee-inclusive APR, so the two APR columns are not built the same way and a rate-to-rate reading is the safer one. And any rate comparison is a snapshot: the figure that decides what a loan costs you is the APR on a Loan Estimate, which is the one document where every lender has to itemize the same charges in the same order.
Who Should Choose a 30-Year Fixed Mortgage
Income, DTI, Equity, Refinance Goals, and Long-Term Interest Savings
Choose a 30-year fixed if you want the lowest required payment and the most schedule flexibility, and you accept that the same loan will cost you far more interest than a shorter term. Choose a 15-year instead if your income and debt-to-income ratio comfortably carry the larger payment and your priority is building equity and paying less in total.
The trade is not close, and it is worth seeing the size of it. Priced at the average spread between the two terms that Freddie Mac has recorded since 1991, the 30-year payment is roughly a quarter lower than the 15-year payment on the same loan, and the lifetime interest is about two and a half times as much.
30-Year Fixed
Lowest required payment
Most flexibility, most total interest, slowest equity.
15-Year Fixed
Lowest total cost
Bigger payment, far less interest, fastest equity.
The 15-year has never once been priced above the 30-year.
Across all 1,820 weeks in which Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey has published both series, beginning 30 August 1991, the 30-year rate has exceeded the 15-year rate in every single week. There are no exceptions. The premium averages a little over half a percentage point, and it has widened since the 1990s. Paying more to borrow for longer is not a market condition. It is a structural constant.
The premium buys something specific, and it is written into your loan contract. Section 4 of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac uniform fixed-rate note gives you the right to repay in part or in full at any time without a prepayment charge. Section 6 lets the lender demand the balance early only if you default. You can walk away from your interest rate whenever it suits you; the lender can never walk away from it. That asymmetry is not a courtesy. A Federal Reserve Bank of Boston paper published in May 2026 argues that the gap between mortgage rates and Treasury yields largely reflects the price of that prepayment option, and that factors driving the option's value explain about 80% of the variation in it since 2006. Its conclusion is blunt: borrowers win whether rates rise or fall, investors lose either way, and they charge for it.
So the honest way to read the term premium is as a price rather than a penalty. The question is whether you will use what you are buying.
A 30-year fixed suits you if
- The lower payment is what makes the debt-to-income ratio work, or what leaves room to save and invest elsewhere.
- Your income is variable, and you want a low required payment with the option to overpay in the good months.
- You expect to move or refinance well before the term ends. Most people do: sellers in NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers had owned their home a record 11 years.
- You want the rate itself as an asset. FHFA researchers found that every percentage point by which market rates exceed a homeowner's own fixed rate cuts their probability of selling by 18.1%, an effect that prevented an estimated 1.72 million home sales between 2022 and 2024.
It costs you if
- You could carry the 15-year payment. Then the term premium is money spent on an option you were never going to exercise.
- Equity matters to you soon. On a 30-year fixed at a 6% rate the balance does not fall below half the original principal until around year 21, and the first payment is about 83% interest.
- Total cost is your measure. Above a rate of roughly 5.35%, the interest on a 30-year loan exceeds 100% of the amount borrowed: you repay the house twice.
Both of the figures above are plain amortization arithmetic on the stated assumptions, not projections. Run them on your own numbers below.
Compare a 30-Year and a 15-Year on Your Own Numbers
The calculator pulls both rates from the same live pricing as the table at the top of this page. Change the loan amount, the term, the points and the closing costs, and it will show the monthly payment, the total interest and the total cost of each, side by side.
Total savings of $208,066 over the life of the loan
Mortgage interest rates shown are based on a 780 credit score with 20% down payment or equity. FHA, VA, and USDA rates may vary slightly for different credit profiles.
Loan Comparison Report
Generated:
Loan Details
| Loan 1 | Loan 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Loan Amount | $320,000 | $320,000 |
| Term | 30 years | 15 years |
| Interest Rate | 6.00% | 5.75% |
| Monthly Payment | $1,919 | $2,657 |
Cost Comparison
| Loan 1 | Loan 2 | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Closing Costs | $4,400 | $8,700 | +$4,300 |
| Total Interest | $370,682 | $158,316 | -$212,366 |
| Total Cost | $695,082 | $487,016 | -$208,066 |
Recommendation: Loan 2 is the Better Choice
Based on total cost analysis, Loan 2 (15-Year) saves you $208,066 over the life of the loan, despite higher monthly payments.
What Affects 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates
Credit Score, LTV, Occupancy, Property Type, Loan Purpose, and Rate Lock
Two borrowers can apply to the same lender on the same morning for the same 30-year fixed and be quoted different rates. The reasons are specific, and they are priced.
- Credit score and loan-to-value, together. These are not two separate adjustments, they are one grid. GoRealo's own 30-year conventional pricing carries several credit-score bands above 80% loan-to-value and a single price at or below it, which is another way of saying that a large down payment can be worth more to your rate than a high credit score is. FHA prices its insurance without reference to credit score at all, which is why it often wins on weaker credit and loses on strong credit. Our national FHA mortgage rates page sets that comparison out in full.
- Discount points and lender credits. A point costs 1% of the loan and buys the rate down. This is the single largest reason published 30-year rates differ from one another: a headline rate quoted with two points bought is not the same product as a zero-point rate, and survey rates such as Freddie Mac's have not published an accompanying points figure since 2022. Always ask what a quoted rate costs in points before comparing it to anything.
- Debt-to-income ratio and loan amount. DTI governs whether the loan is approved and how much you can borrow; the loan amount decides whether you are priced as conforming or as jumbo, which are different markets with different investors.
- Occupancy and property type. A primary residence prices best. Second homes and investment properties carry pricing adjustments, and so do condominiums, manufactured homes and multi-unit properties.
- Loan purpose. Purchase, rate-and-term refinance and cash-out refinance are underwritten and priced separately, and cash-out is generally the most expensive of the three.
- Rate lock period. A rate is a quote until it is locked. Longer locks cost more, because the lender is carrying the risk of the market moving for longer.
- The bond market underneath all of it. Your rate is not set by your lender's opinion. It starts from the 10-year Treasury and the mortgage-backed securities market, then adds the guarantee fee charged by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which the Boston Fed puts at roughly 42 basis points, the lender's own margin, and the price of the prepayment option described above. That total spread over Treasuries has ranged from under 100 basis points in 2021 to more than 300 during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis.
The 30-year fixed is not a law of finance, incidentally: it is an American institution. Long fixed-rate mortgages with free prepayment are rare internationally, and the form was created in the 1930s as a response to a banking collapse rather than as a homeownership program. It survived because a securitization market grew up to fund it.
For the same rates cut by state and metro, see our national mortgage rates hub, our Florida mortgage rates page and our Jacksonville mortgage rates page. For the 30-year fixed inside a single program, see FHA 30-year fixed purchase rates.
Frequently Asked Questions
They are live in the table at the top of this page, priced from GoRealo's own lender pricing across conventional, FHA, VA and jumbo, all on the 30-year fixed term and a matched loan amount. Read the APR beside the interest rate. The rate sets your monthly payment; the APR folds in the lender charges that Regulation Z treats as finance charges, which is why two loans with the same rate can cost different amounts. The rates shown assume a single-family primary residence on a purchase, at each program's standard published tier.
A national average locked rate is the average rate borrowers actually locked with lenders on the previous business day, drawn from roughly 35% of US mortgage transactions and published as the Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices. It is not an advertised rate and not a survey response, which makes it the fairer benchmark. The comparison widget on this page puts GoRealo's 30-year pricing next to it on a matched scenario. One caution: the market benchmark publishes a rate rather than a fee-inclusive APR, so compare rate to rate, and settle the question properly by comparing Loan Estimates, where every lender must itemize the same charges in the same order.
It is cheaper every month and dearer overall, so the answer depends on which of those you are optimizing. Freddie Mac has published both the 30-year and 15-year series every week since August 1991, and in all 1,820 of those weeks the 30-year has never once been cheaper than the 15-year. The premium averages a little over half a percentage point. Priced at that average, a 30-year payment is roughly a quarter lower than a 15-year payment on the same loan, while the lifetime interest is about two and a half times as much. Take the 30-year if the lower required payment is what makes the loan work or what buys you flexibility; take the 15-year if you can carry the bigger payment and want the lower total cost.
Spreading repayment over 360 months instead of 180 lowers the required principal-and-interest payment by roughly a quarter compared with a 15-year loan of the same size, even though the 30-year carries a higher rate. That lower payment is the product you are buying, and it is what lets many borrowers meet a lender's debt-to-income limit at all. Note that the payment quoted in any rate table, including ours, is principal and interest only: property taxes, homeowners insurance, HOA dues and any mortgage insurance are additional, and on an FHA loan the insurance premium runs for the life of most loans.
Against a shorter term, it does not save interest, it costs interest. The saving a 30-year fixed delivers is in cash flow, not in total cost. The interest you can genuinely save on one comes from the rate you negotiate and from prepaying, and the second of those is a right written into the loan itself: section 4 of the standard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fixed-rate note lets you repay in part or in full at any time with no prepayment charge, while the lender can only demand the balance early if you default. Keep paying a 15-year-sized payment on a 30-year loan and the extra goes entirely to principal, which shortens the term and cuts the total interest without ever obliging you to.
Hold everything except the rate constant. Use the same loan amount, the same term, the same occupancy and property type, the same loan purpose and the same lock period, then compare the APR rather than the note rate. The most common reason two published 30-year rates differ is discount points: a rate quoted with two points bought down is not the same product as a zero-point rate, and survey rates such as Freddie Mac's have not published a points figure alongside them since 2022. Ask every lender what the quoted rate costs in points, then compare Loan Estimates, which is the one document that forces the same charges into the same boxes.