This page documents the data sources, calculation methods, and refresh cadence behind every number we publish. For our broader playbook on topic selection, fact-checking, AI use, sourcing, and corrections, see our editorial standards.

Daily rates snapshot

The headline 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, and 10-year Treasury numbers shown across the site come directly from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API, published by the St. Louis Fed. We use three series:

• MORTGAGE30US for the 30-year fixed conforming average
• MORTGAGE15US for the 15-year fixed conforming average
• DGS10 for the 10-year Treasury constant maturity yield

FRED publishes MORTGAGE30US and MORTGAGE15US once per week (Thursdays), reflecting Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey of conforming, conventional, owner-occupied, single-family purchase loans for the prior week. DGS10 publishes daily on business days. Because the two mortgage series are weekly, our daily snapshot for any given weekday carries forward the most recent observation at or before that date. The 10-year Treasury number reflects the most recent business-day close.

None of these numbers represent an offer of credit or a rate available to any particular borrower. They are historical national averages. Your own rate depends on your file, your property, and the day you lock.

Public archive of every snapshot

Every weekday snapshot we publish is preserved in a public archive so you can verify what we cited on any given day. Browse all snapshots at /rates/archive, view a single date at /rates/archive/<yyyy-mm-dd>, or pull the raw data from /api/rates/archive.json. Snapshots are immutable once captured.

Lock signal

The lock signal compares the most recent 30-year fixed reading to its trailing distribution and to the 10-year Treasury trend. We compute three inputs from FRED history:

• The day-over-day change in the 30-year fixed average
• The week-over-week change in the 30-year fixed average
• The 30-year fixed reading’s percentile within its trailing 30, 90, and 365 days

We do not predict where rates are going. The signal describes where today sits relative to recent history, with the explicit disclaimer that timing the market is impossible and the right decision depends on your scenario, not on any single reading.

Affordability index

The affordability heatmap and index pair the same FRED 30-year fixed series with the latest median home price and median household income figures published by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For each metro and each month, we compute the principal-and-interest payment on the median-priced home at that month’s 30-year fixed average using a 20% down payment assumption, then express it as a percentage of median household income. Lower percentages are more affordable.

The index is informational and does not include taxes, insurance, HOA dues, or PMI. It also does not adjust for local tax burden or cost of living. Use it as a comparative signal, not a budget.

Refresh cadence

• Live rates strip: refreshed from FRED every six hours, with stale-while-revalidate so the page always shows something
• Daily snapshot post: auto-published every US weekday morning
• Public rates archive: backfilled on every deploy and refreshed every six hours from FRED, then persisted to our database so older snapshots stay stable
• Affordability data: refreshed when the Census and BLS source series publish new monthly readings

News and headline sources

Headline context that appears in the weekly market recap and in news-anchored explainer posts is drawn from a fixed allowlist of named publishers and primary-source feeds. We never quote anonymous or unattributed reporting, and we never name a lender.

• CNBC Real Estate
• Realtor.com News
• HousingWire
• NAHB Eye on Housing
• NAHB Eye on the Economy
• Reuters Business
• Federal Reserve Press Releases
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics news releases

Each upstream item is normalized and scrubbed before it can be cited; URLs are validated, scheme-checked, and stored before any outbound link is ever rendered.

Auto-published posts and the compliance scrub

The daily rates snapshot, the weekly market recap, and our twice-daily evergreen and trending explainer posts are drafted on a fixed schedule using a large language model and then run through an automated compliance scrub before they go live. The scrub rejects any draft that quotes a specific rate, payment, or APR, names a specific lender, tells a reader they qualify, contains em or en dashes or emojis, falls outside the published word-count or SEO-length budgets, or links anywhere outside our internal allowlist. Rejected drafts are written to an audit table with the reason and are not retried that day. For the full policy, see our editorial standards.

Limitations and what we will not do

Mortgage Today is an educational publisher. We do not originate, broker, or fund loans, and nothing we publish is an offer of credit or a quote. We do not display lender-specific pricing, do not name any specific lender, and do not tell any reader they qualify for a program. Calculator outputs and rate citations are illustrative only and reflect national averages from public sources. All loan applications are subject to credit approval.