What this shows you
A side-by-side view of three numbers that decide what a mortgage costs in eight major countries: the central bank reference rate, the mortgage benchmark (WIBOR, EURIBOR, SOFR, SONIA) that consumer loan products track, and the typical 20-year fixed rate a normal household is being offered right now.
Use it to compare your country to its neighbours, to spot whether the cycle is going up or down, and to walk into a bank meeting knowing what a reasonable quote looks like.
This is reference data, not a real-time quote feed. The Polish reference rate is pulled live from the National Bank of Poland API when available; everything else is a curated snapshot updated periodically with a clear "as of" date and a link to the official source so you can verify in one click.
How to use it
- Pick a country from the segmented bar. Available: Poland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States. EU countries share the ECB main refinancing rate but each country has its own typical mortgage range.
- Read the three big numbers: the central bank rate (what the policy maker set), the benchmark (what consumer mortgages track), and the typical 20-year offering (what a normal customer is being quoted).
- Look at the 12-month mini chart. A steep down-slope means you missed the cheap window. A flat line means rates are in pause mode. An up-slope means it is getting more expensive to wait.
- Compare the benchmark to the typical mortgage rate. The gap is the bank's margin (plus risk premium, plus regulatory cost). In Poland that gap is roughly 1.5 to 2 percentage points; in the euro area roughly 1 to 1.5; in the US roughly 1.5 to 2 over SOFR for adjustable products.
- Click any source link in the bottom row to verify the headline rate on the official central bank or benchmark administrator website.
- Tap Copy snapshot to copy a plain-text summary (country, all three rates, sources) to your clipboard. Paste it into a notes app, an email to your broker, or a spreadsheet.
- Note the "Live" badge next to the central bank rate when the value was fetched in real time from an API. No badge means the value comes from the curated snapshot with a verified "as of" date.
When this is useful
Real moments where seeing all three rates side by side changes a decision:
- About to take out a mortgage: knowing where the central bank rate is, where it has moved over 12 months, and what banks are typically quoting tells you whether the offer in front of you is normal, cheap, or a rip-off. A 6.5% mortgage in Poland today is roughly the market middle; a 7.2% offer is the high end and worth negotiating.
- Deciding fixed vs variable: in countries where mortgages are usually variable (Spain, parts of Italy, Poland), the spread between the benchmark rate and the offered typical rate tells you the bank's margin. If you fix today, you lock that spread for the term of the fix.
- Refinancing your current loan: if the central bank rate has fallen by more than about 1 percentage point since you signed, and your loan is variable or due for a re-fix, refinancing usually pays off (rule of thumb: at least 0.75 to 1.0 pp drop plus 24 months left).
- Buying a property abroad: the typical-rate column lets you compare the cost of a German mortgage versus a French one versus a Spanish one without trawling through bank websites in three languages.
- Negotiating with a broker: walking in with "I know the ECB main refinancing rate is at 2.25% and the typical 20-year fixed is around 3.45%" reframes the meeting. You stop being the person asking what is on offer and start being the person checking what the offer actually means.
- Tracking the cycle: looking at all 8 countries at once shows you whether the easing cycle is global (most central banks moving the same way), regional (only the ECB or only the Fed), or divergent (which has been the case more than once over the past decade).
Related tools: loan calculator, refinance calculator, inflation calculator, currency converter.
Questions and answers
The central bank reference rate is the headline interest rate the country's central bank sets. It controls how expensive money is for every commercial bank, which controls how expensive any loan, savings account, or bond becomes. In Poland this is the NBP reference rate (stopa referencyjna), in the euro area the ECB main refinancing rate, in the UK the Bank of England Bank Rate, in the US the Federal Funds target range. A mortgage rate is almost never equal to the central bank rate, but it moves with it: when the central bank cuts by 0.25 percentage points, variable mortgages usually drop by a similar amount within one to three months. Fixed-rate mortgages move with longer-dated bond yields, which are themselves driven by where the market thinks central bank rates are going next.