Where the numbers on this site come from.

Conventional pricing

Conventional scenarios are priced through our licensed broker pricing engines against live wholesale rate sheets from the lenders in our network. Wholesale pricing is what a lender publishes to brokers, before the margin a retail lender adds for itself.

A price is produced by running an actual scenario through those engines. We do not keep a spreadsheet of rates and we do not adjust a headline number by hand. If the engines cannot price a scenario, the page says so rather than showing an approximation.

FHA and VA pricing

FHA and VA scenarios price through a wholesale lender real-time quote API rather than the conventional rate-sheet path, because government pricing depends on program-specific inputs that a generic grid does not carry.

The result is the same kind of number: a live quote for a described scenario, with its own as-of stamp, and nothing carried forward from a previous day.

National-average context

Where a national average appears, it is the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, labeled as such and dated. It is context for the direction of the market, not a rate you can get.

The survey is a weekly average across a large sample of loans that do not look like yours. We never present it as a quote and never blend it into our own pricing.

Credit bands

Mortgage pricing moves in credit bands, not point by point. On public pages the bands we show are 20 points wide and are priced at the band midpoint, so a published figure represents the middle of the band rather than the best score inside it.

That choice is deliberately conservative in both directions: it prevents a top-of-band number from being advertised as if everyone in the band could get it, and it keeps the comparison between bands honest.

Scenario bucketing and as-of stamps

Public pricing is bucketed. One priced scenario stands in for a range of visitors with similar inputs, because pricing every individual visitor live would mean running an engine call for every page view.

Every priced figure carries an as-of stamp saying when it was priced. Rate sheets can republish several times in a business day, so a stamp from earlier in the day is a real limitation and we show it instead of hiding it.

The home page headline figure

The rate at the top of the home page is priced once each weekday at 12:00 PM Eastern, on one representative scenario, and it is held until the next run. It is shown with the date it was priced. We chose a single daily run over a number that moves through the day, because a headline that drifts hourly tells a visitor nothing they can act on and invites a comparison against a figure that no longer exists.

Outside business days it shows the most recent weekday run, still stamped with that run’s own date, so a Sunday visitor sees Friday’s number labeled Friday. If a run fails, the previous good figure stays up with its true date rather than being restamped as current.

The scenario pricer and the refinance verdict tool are not affected by this. Both price live each time you press Update.

What we do when an engine is offline

When a pricing engine is unavailable, we show nothing. No cached rate presented as current, no last-known number, no estimate assembled from an average.

A blank slot with an honest explanation is a worse-looking page and a more useful one. A stale rate that reads as live is the single easiest way for a shopping site to mislead someone.

How we measure break-even

Break-even is measured on cost. We take the net cost of the refinance and divide it by the monthly payment reduction. The result is the number of months before the new loan has paid for itself.

• The escrow refund from the old loan is netted against the cost of the refinance. It reduces what you have to come out of pocket, so it belongs on the cost side.
• The skipped payment is never counted as savings. It is a timing effect on your cash flow, and the money it represents ends up in the new loan balance.
• Points paid to buy a rate down are part of the cost, not a separate footnote.
• A lower payment is not automatically a saving. When a short remaining term would be reset to a new full term, the tool compares the interest you would pay either way and reports that refinancing costs more, even when the monthly number falls.
• A break-even that lands past the time you realistically expect to keep the loan is reported as a reason to wait, even though waiting is the outcome that pays us nothing.

What none of it is

Nothing on RateVerdict is an offer to lend, a rate lock, or a commitment to lend. Every figure is preliminary until a licensed loan officer has reviewed a complete application, and all loans are subject to credit approval, underwriting, and program guidelines.

Mortgage brokerage services are provided by F5 Mortgage LLC, NMLS #1938115, licensed in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia. We do not price or accept applications outside those states.