Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions
finfam.appWhen I bought my home, the big bank I'd been using for years quoted me 7% APR. A local credit union was offering 5.5% for the exact same mortgage.
I was surprised until I learned that mortgages are basically standardized products – the government buys almost all of them (see Bits About Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manuf...). So what's the price difference paying for? A recent Bloomberg Odd Lots episode makes the case that it's largely advertising and marketing (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-11-28/odd-lots-thi...). Credit unions are non-profits without big marketing budgets, so they can pass those savings on, but a lot of people don't know about them.
I built this dashboard to make it easier to shop around. I pull public rates from 120+ credit union websites and compares against the weekly FRED national benchmark.
Features:
- Filter by loan type (30Y/15Y/etc.), eligibility (the hardest part tbh), and rate type - Payment calculator with refi mode (CUs can be a bit slower than big lenders, but that makes them great for refi) - Links to each CU's rates page and eligibility requirements - Toggle to show/hide statistical outliers
At the time of writing, the average CU rate is 5.91% vs. 6.23% national average. about $37k difference in total interest on a $500k loan. I actually used seaborn to visualize the rate spread against the four big banks: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pcj9t7/oc...
Stack: Python for the data/backend, Svelte/SvelteKit for the frontend. No signup, no ads, no referral fees.
Happy to answer questions about the methodology or add CUs people suggest.
Good idea. A few years back I built https://originationdata.com that compares mortgage lenders (both FDIC & FCUA members) using HMDA data. I modeled rates by lender, product type as well as by facets like MSA (as well as STL FRED data, too). It grew for a few years and I was ecstatic-- getting backlinks organically from some impressive sites (e.g. larger banks themselves, consumer publications) as well as positive user feedback. Then Google pushed their "Helpful Content Update" and Google search traffic absolutely tanked, so I kind of abandoned it and moved onto other projects that won't be SEO oriented, since Google's view of quality is unbeknownst to me.
Hey I really like the aesthetics.
> Then Google pushed their "Helpful Content Update" and...
May I just say, no matter what you work on, a separate piece of work will be getting people to know about it.
So fine, people can no longer find you on google. But if your website is truly useful, people will keep talking about it and linking to it, no?
Anyway, what are you working on now?
I still use this regularly :) thanks for building it. any interest in open sourcing? i can help
Oh snap! I was just looking at originationdata.com this week! So awesome. I had originally hoped HMDA data was more than annual, but no luck. It's also a shame that the current admin turned off the data stream here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/owning-a-home/explore-rates/
I thought maybe you'd been hit by that update, but even more bummed to hear Google enshittification struck again.
The Modified LAR product is what you may want to look at, then. Yes, it is annual, but if you aren't against modeling data, look at the rate spread value, segment then project vs current FRED data and you'll get pretty close to actuals. You can also extract fees and derive APR in addition to having APY data.
Having worked in mortgage, two important points: 1. Credit unions and large banks do not have access to the same vault of loan products at the same rates as each other. Fannie and Freddie offer rate discounts at volume. 2. Credit unions typically do not run mortgage programs for profit, unlike big banks. This also contributes to their ability to eat your cost.
Tit-for-tat, if you reduce it all down, the Chase's and Wells' should be able to offer the better terms based on their agreements with GSEs/secondary markets.
In reality, no one is getting the product at face value, so opportunities like this will exist, and you can take advantage of it like in these cases.
There's also specialization and process optimization that big banks do that little CUs simply don't have the volume to justify. If someone buried deep within BofA or Chase or some other national entity looks at your stuff and says some factor that's marginal makes it a no-go for some product that's the end of it despite being offset by some other factor that's out of the ordinary in a good direction. At a credit union with the process broken down across fewer people the person making that decision is more likely to be able to see that the big picture math still works for a given product.
Nice work.
Navy Federal has always had competitive rates: https://www.navyfederal.org/loans-cards/mortgage/mortgage-ra...
Membership requires a military connection in the family, but it can go back to grandparents: https://www.navyfederal.org/membership/eligibility.html
Love a public rates page. Added to my list for tomorrow.
This was the first one I looked for as well, NFCU is (per Wikipedia) the largest CU in terms of size and membership in the US - but wasn't included. I think you should add a "how I chose these Credit Unions" on your overview, as missing NFCU immediately made me wonder what others were missed; RBFCU - largest in TX and 10th largest in US - is missing as well. So I'm left to wonder how 2 of the largest CUs in the country were just... missed.
I find it somewhat interesting that a US 30 year fixed mortgage is 5,49%, while a 10 year fixed mortgage in Sweden currently is at 3,6%[1]. Big difference!
[1] https://www.compricer.se/borantor/
A lot of that is from the term. Rate goes up with term. A 10yr or a 15yr in the US would have a lower rate
If you are comparing across currencies you have to take each currencies expected inflation rate into account.
Nice Work!
I found our credit union posts the mortgage rates clearly on a plain text like page. There's no BS and no games. Whereas with the big banks, you get the games and higher rates .. no matter if they have records of 10 years of your salary deposits. When I tried to suggest credit unions to friends, I got looks. Like, people just assume what everyone else does (get conned by big banks) is good.
I have had bank accounts only with credit unions for the last 20 years. I have never found a need to open an account with one of the big banks. That said, people look at me like I’m crazy when I mention this.
I too have noticed an inexplicable apprehension about credit unions, even large ones such as Wings. They are almost uniformly better for individuals than big banks, yet people imagine a scenario where they'll need to withdraw cash in the middle of the Mojave so they need WF. Spoiler: 1) you won't and 2) you still can.
Probablty has to do with anti-communist sentiment?
If you'd like, I'd be happy to add that CU to the roster. Hoping to do more to make the full range of market options more mainstream.
Except maybe Texas, where else can you buy a house/apt in the US near a major job center for only 400k?
National median home price is $410k[1]. Texas is less than $300k[2]. Only thing that's unrealistic is most people who buy a house for $400k will probably get an FHA loan and put 3% down so will have a higher payment because of (1) mortgage insurance and (2) borrowing more money.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS [2]: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/6915/san-antonio-tx/
Those are just some medians I either Googled or LLM'd to act as defaults. You can click that sentence and change all those values to estimate.
Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Chicago, probably many others
Are you in CA, NY, or MA? I wonder if your scale is skewed.
Are those really standardized in the US?
Where I live the condition vary widely. And basically the switching costs might easily dominate the total costs if you move/sell.
I've found that taking this into account it was better to trade a few places in term of interests for better conditions.
Yes, extremely, especially for confirming loans: https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/originating-underwriting/...
Patrick McKenzie (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11) has a great deep dive on this: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manuf...
Closing/switching costs are certainly a consideration still, but the "Truth in Lending Act" (TILA) made it easier to compare the all-in cost by providing a standardized APR number, which is what the dashboard focuses on.
* conforming loans
Everyone should switch to a local credit union.
The rates are better, they're entirely local, and they're usually not trying to actively screw you.
Good work!
Does anyone else think that the government should do something like this? Either enforce that vendors sends their offers to a central database which is publicly accessible, or at least make it available so the vendors can choose to send data there (maybe enforce it for big vendors, to get it started).
In general I think it makes sense for the government to be responsible for the market place, and the infrastructure around the market. The data should be avaliable publicly through a API so one could build different frontends and analysis services on it.
Example markets are electricity, deposits, mortgages, housing.
At first glance, this site seems fantastic! Great job! (As a side note, I've been reading Hacker news for years but have never been active; I created an account just to make this comment)
Cool concept, but it doesn’t account for assumptions the sites make when displaying rates. Not something to you can really account for across the board though is it? Like “assuming a $300k loan on a home valued at $600k” to get a low 5’s rate… for example.
Definitely. Unlikely that anyone starting here will get exactly the estimated monthly payment, especially as it takes time to lock in a rate and rates can change daily. What it does do is only use APRs to give as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as can be had. Click any entry in the table to go through to the CU's site, which usually has some means of getting a more accurate rate and/or quote.
This is awesome! I wish there was sth similar for Europe! In Germany you have to go to a morgage broker and trust that his self-interest is aligned with yours :D
I pay a below 1% fixed rate for a 20 years mortgage since 4 years ago here in Belgium
I went to a mortgage broker first who offered me worse tho not necessarily bad rates with other banks as an option. The 2 best options I found were not on his roster. The mortgage broker did say he preferred not taking insurance discounts as those insurance cost could go up up to a maximum and couldn't then be renegotiated separately. But so far it's been better for me and of course that broker would also have negotiated the separate insurance and gotten his cut.
The current rate in France is more or less 3.2% for 25 years. It's better than the rates we see on this page but as someone who bought at a rate of 1% (1.75% real rate, something like that) I strongly advise people not to have a 33% debt ratio.
This is the max allowed by banks but it's a huge risk compared to renting which is basically risk-free. Buying something less expensive to have a smaller debt ratio may be better than renting.
ps: comparing rates alone isn't fair because Europe has a lot more taxes
Right there on https://hypofriend.de/en/mortgage-rates-germany first link on Google.
Thanks for the link but thats not really the same. They are just giving you indications and then you have to sign up. I would like to see more concrete numbers per bank. Maybe there are not many factors that influence the rate?
They are exactly the kind of mortgage broker mentioned in the parent comment.
God I wish we had 30 year fixed mortgages here in Australia. Imagine getting one of those during covid when rates were below 3%. Incredible.
There are downsides.
I have a really great rate on my mortgage, but our house is super expensive and small for our family… but now we can’t afford to move.
If we moved to a new house, we would have to pay off this great mortgage and get a new one, at a much higher interest rate. Even if we found a house that cost the exact same as ours, the monthly payment would be 50% higher, because current interest rates are more than twice what we have. We are locked into our house.
If you were looking to buy a house right now, you'd be looking at a bunch of options that are worse than what you currently have. You experience this as lock-in but in reality the "problem" is just that you have something significantly better than anything you (or others) can find on the market right now. And of course that's actually a fantastic boon.
But part of that is because people who would otherwise want to sell their house are choosing NOT to, because they don't want to lose their great mortgage. If we didn't have these long, fixed rate, mortgages, there would be a lot more housing liquidity and prices wouldn't be so inflated.
Now, there is a cycle of "rates go down, there is a flurry of re-finances and everyone locks in the lower rates and new buyers enter the market, and housing prices go up and up", and then rates go up, but housing prices don't go down because people can't afford to buy the houses at the same prices anymore, and so no one wants to sell (because the current owners are paying below market rates for their mortgage, so they face no selling pressure like they would if there WEREN'T long term fixed rate mortages), so there is no decrease in prices.
You're missing the bright side - this upwards price ratchet is amazing for institutional investors and banks and realtors, though.
What’s the alternative that’s better? Having a 5/1 or 1/1 ARM just means that your current house’s mortgage would also be more expensive because your 3% mortgage would have adjusted upward by now.
If you’re willing to have your current mortgage be more expensive to avoid the “downside of being locked into a low payment, you could just pretend your mortgage had adjusted and go buy a house that suits your needs better.
Home prices are probably higher now than they would be due to the limited supply due to people being locked into house.
Aren't most people who are "locked into house" a seller that's removed from the market, but also a buyer that's removed from the market?
I can see how someone who decides to keep their current house to use as a rental and buy a new owner-occupied property would tend to increase house purchase prices slightly (but also increase rental availability and lower rent prices slightly), but also think that’s a tiny minority of current homeowners.
This is some drawback. "I have access to the same bad alternatives as everyone else."
This is why the US housing market is deadlocked (live locked?).
Sellers arent willing to lower prices AND lose a low rate and buyers aren't willing to pay those prices and expect a buyer's market.
Nothing is moving and realtors are hurting.
Something has to pop the bubble, will it be massive job loss that forces relocation or sale for cash and move to apartment?
Who knows?
You used to be able to assume someone's mortgage when you bought their house to keep the good rate going, but that's much less common now
You still can with certain types of mortgages.
Do 30-year mortgages make the other houses more expensive somehow? It sounds like you got a good deal and any change would be worse than the good deal you got. I'd appreciate it if I was you.
Edit: unless you mean that the downside of 30-year mortgages is you hardly get to pay off the principal in the first several years and don't build much equity maybe? That's more a "long mortgages" thing.
> Do 30-year mortgages make the other houses more expensive somehow?
OP didn't mean to say this, but yes, unfortunately they do. Anything that "increases affordability" will result in an eventual increase in the principal value for things that are supply constrained.
I appreciate the good deal we have, but my point is that long term fixed mortgages really complicates the housing market and can make it so you are stuck where you are, especially if you buy a house when rates are low.
Think about what happens. My wife and I wanted to buy a house. Our budget is mostly around what we can afford as our monthly payment, just like everyone else. That means if interest rates are low, we can afford a much more expensive house (obviously). Ok, so we buy one with a payment we are comfortable with.
Now, rates go up. Say we need to move for a job, so we need a new house, and we still have the same budget. Well, that means the total cost of the house we can afford is much lower, because the higher interest rates means the total loan value must be much smaller to keep our monthly rate the same. If we were first time buyers, this is fine, because everyone is in the same boat; everyone has a smaller budget because monthly payments on the mortgage are higher, so housing prices should be lower. If that is the case, though, it means the house we are trying to sell won't sell for as much (because mortgages for house will cost people more), which means we would end up taking a loss on our mortgage (because even though our monthly payment is the same as the new loan, the total value of the old loan is a lot higher).
Of course, prices for houses don't move nearly as much when interest rates change as they should (relative to mortgage purchasing power). This is for many reasons, but part of it is because when rates are high, people (like me) don't want to sell their house and have to lose their really good mortgage, so fewer houses are on the market, which inflates prices. When rates go down, more people want to buy and sell houses, because they can both get more for their house they are selling and they can afford bigger mortgages on their new houses, which inflate prices.
Basically, this lack of mortgage liquidity works to keep housing prices high. When rates are high, no one wants to sell OR buy, and when rates are low, everyone wants to sell AND buy. Both result in prices being high.
30 year fixed mortgages are just a really weird financial product that has all sorts of market disrupting effects. You can pre-pay them whenever you want, so when rates are low, high rate loans are paid off and low rate loans replace them, but that means no one wants to sell their house and lose their great loan when rates are high. This means housing prices soar when rates are low, but don't come back down when rates are high. It creates a ratcheting effect on house prices, which is why so few people are able to buy houses.
This continues until the entire market collapses, like it did in 2007, and then the process repeats.
But, moving to a new house doesn't necessarily mean you have to sell the old house. In fact, since you got such a good deal on the first house, you can probably rent it our for a profit, and said profit can help you pay whatever you need to pay to be able to move to a new house that's more expensive, yet similar in quality.
Yes, I moved already using this method. People complaining of low rates just don't have any financial skills.
Would renting it out be an option?
It would be difficult. Mortgage interest is deductible from your taxes (up to a point), but only if it is your primary home. If we moved, we would have to pay a lot more in taxes.
The mortgage tax deduction is another thing that drives up home prices.
Rentals don't have deductible interest but have depreciation, which can be even better.
Same in the UK. We typically get 2 or 5 year fixed deals, then you're expected to remortgage or you end up on the lender's standard variable rate (usually painfully higher).
My first mortgage was a 2-year fix at 1.89% during covid. When that ended I had to remortgage at nearly 5%. That was a fun conversation with my partner.
The US system is genuinely unusual globally. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac basically absorb all that interest rate risk that would otherwise sit with borrowers. It's a massive implicit subsidy that most Americans don't fully appreciate.
Listen. I'm sure they seemed like a good idea at the time, but we tied them to retirement (so your entire material wealth is stuck in an illiquid asset that also falls apart slowly over time), and now we can't build any new housing because people think it will affect their golden years. Learn from our mistakes.
just makes the prices higher... you qualify for a house based on ratio of income to payment. so the demand is heavily influenced by the type of financing available..
Other than natural demand, Australia has a high real estate market due to the tax and a superannuation/pension distortions. Should try to fix those first. (probably impossible)
And as I pointed out in a sibling comment, it can lock you into your house if interest rates go up. We can’t afford to sell our house because the extra interest costs would increase our monthly payment by 50% even if the house cost the exact same as our current one.
I still don't understand how this means you "can't afford to sell your house." It just means you can't afford to buy another house at the same price as the one you have now. That's a different problem, and one that doesn't actually have anything to do with the interest rate on your existing mortgage. You can't afford to buy a house today at the same price that you could on the date you closed on your current house, but that's true regardless of the interest rate on the current house.
Let's put a number on it. Since the article uses $400k as a reference point, let's use that. You could afford to buy a $400k house back when you bought your current house. You cannot afford to buy a $400k house today. That would be true whether or not you had purchased your current house, and regardless of the interest rate on its mortgage if you had.
You only "can't afford to sell your house" if you're underwater on the mortgage and can't come up with the money to sell it.
Yes, what you say is technically correct.
We feel trapped because we would have to massively downgrade to move. Obviously, we COULD do that, but we don't want to.
You are right, we also couldn't afford to buy our current house if we currently didn't own a home, either. I am arguing that the fixed thirty year mortgages artificially drives up prices, which means that you are stuck and can't move whenever interest rates are high.
If we didn't have the fixed thirty year mortgages, housing prices would have never gotten so high, and buying and selling houses would be a lot easier, and people could move to where they want to be much easier.
You are locked in because currently you have a great deal that you don't want to lose. If you were in Australia, you would already be paying that higher interest rate for your current house. I don't see how that's a downside.
That's very similar to not being able to change jobs because you cannot find another job that pay even 66.6% as well as your current one.
I have friends on 1% fixed rates over 30 here in Denmark. Bastards.
Doesn't Denmark allow to move your mortgage rate to another house? That is even better than the US.
Haha, wait until you hear about our fancy 50-year mortgages we'll be getting any day now!
But seriously, my favorite discovery when researching CU mortgages is the prevalence of the 15/15 ARM. It's fixed for 15 years, and then adjusts once. Most people refinance within 7 years, or move within 12. So it's like a 30Y fixed, but comes in at 20 basis points cheaper (0.2% lower APR).
It could be much longer if there was a sensible formula to predict remaining value. Construction quality plays to small a role in valuations.
nice, more people should do stuff like this
good one, mission accomplished! ++1
Ideas for monetization: Setup an automatic email alert if prices are changing for a given area and charge 5 USD per year per user.
Also you could extend this project and sell it later to one of the financial mags / publishers / websites.
I'd be into that, maybe. I guess if I could find an APR 0.5% better than what I've got, I'd refi. I wouldn't have subscribed last year, but now that rates are dropping, it's worth tuning in. But there is a voice of doubt: I'll probably hear about lower mortgage rates in a news headline or my original broker might even reach out.
Id say: There are definetly some persons out there who are willing to pay, and since its once a year usually they forget about their subscription :-D
I do not know about the US market: In the EU, mortgage markets are highly fragmented and its possible to live in one area and get a loan from a bank in another area
Curious, where did you source the data from? Did you just scrape the invidividual bank web sites?
It's always fun to open the front page of HN and see a familiar face. I went to college with this guy! Congrats on shipping Mahmoud!
Haha, my uncreative username betrays me once again. Small world! Congrats on founding to you, too!
The Credit Union Mortgage Association can make the crawling easier via this link: https://mortgages.cumortgage.net/start_up.asp
That's actually where I started! Majority (but not all) of the institutions present on the dashboard are from the CUMA :) I don't technically crawl that portal, but their robots.txt certainly seems to encourage it. Great resource.
My credit union gives me better rates if I'm "active", which means some number of transactions per month. Thus you really need to pick a credit union and start using them a few months before if you want the best rates. (maybe, depending on how that credit union works)
Yeah, there's a somewhat wide variance in CUs, in terms of rates, quality of service, etc. I called a few just to spot check and these public rates are supposedly about as good as they can do. From what I gather, even the large CUs (like Transportation FCU) just don't have that sophisticated of an operating model.
This is absolutely fantastic. I wish this included commercial loans like DSCRs...
Thanks! Re: DSCRs, point me to the data!
CU suggestion: Kansas City's largest, CommunityAmerica Credit Union
https://www.communityamerica.com/about-us
The more the merrier, but as far as I can tell, there are no public rates listed on the CommunityAmerica CU site. All behind a "get in touch" interact: https://www.communityamerica.com/personal/borrow/resources/m...
Great initiative and beautiful site! Tiny nitpick, the wrapping of the controls above the table on my phone could probably be improved. What did you use for the table?
Thanks, and thanks for the heads up! Feel free to shoot me a screenshot/more browser details if you don't mind: blog@finfam.app
The data table is based on https://svelte-headless-table.bryanmylee.com/
Very cool. Can you tell us the tech and tools you used to reliably scrape? or get all of the rate data from the various websites?
It's more manual than you might think! Sent a message to the email in your profile with more details :)
Could you share publicly? Or it’s secret?
Do you do daily scraping to get fresh data? or use services like firecrawler or something?
Yeah, it's partially automated. It doesn't use firecrawler or any other services (other than Render for hosting).
I didn't do a CU for my mortgage (mostly because my lender is awesome and I'm happy with our rate), but I did for my recent auto loan and moved my accounts to them.
NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENCE. customer service is fantastic and their online banking app/website is no bullshit. It even supports TOTP 2FA, which I definitely wasn't expecting given that the huge bank I came from didn't for some reason.
Can't recommend a credit union enough.
Real talk, it's so hard to find TOTP 2FA in banking.
"Rates" dropdown doesn't seem to work. I'm using uBlock Origin.
Pushing a fix to this now. Assuming we're seeing the same thing: clicking the checkbox doesn't work, but clicking the label should. Should be right as rain shortly. Thanks!
> No signup, no ads, no referral fees.
Nice
Love it! Where do you get the data?
Great work. I used to use Bankrate for this, but its UX has gone to shit over the past few years, so it's nice to have an alternative!
Nice job!
ccc
Awesome