Need full financial planning as an API or MCP?

Real rates from 4,300+ lenders, ranked by true cost — not affiliate payouts.

Live rates across mortgages, auto loans, HELOCs, personal loans, and credit cards from every US credit union. Updated daily, ranked by what borrowers actually pay (APR + fees). Build it into your product, or compare rates for a client — no code required.

Open the Compare Tool →
No affiliate payoutsUpdated dailyFree in 10 seconds
Last updated: July 19, 2026
4,300+
Lenders
5
Lending Products
Daily
Rate Updates
True Cost
Never Affiliate
<500ms
Responses

Build with it, or sell with it.

For Developers

Ship rate features without scraping lender sites

  • One endpoint for all 5 products (/v1/decisions)
  • Display-ready savings math — monthly, lifetime, break-even
  • Webhooks, MCP for AI agents, OpenAPI spec, free instant key
Read the docs
For Loan Officers & Brokers

Show your client the best real options in minutes

  • No-code Compare tool — pick a product, enter the scenario
  • Ranked by true cost, never affiliate payouts
  • Save buyer scenarios + export a clean, printable client report

Same free account as the API — no code, no card.

True Cost, Not Headline APR

A 6.125% rate with 2.5 points can cost more than a 6.75% rate with none. We rank on APR + points + fees—so whether you display results in an app or walk a client through their options, the top result is genuinely the best, not the best-paying. No affiliate relationships means no incentive to reorder.

See Full Methodology →

See It In Action

Real API responses, real-time data

POST/v1/decisions
const response = await fetch('https://api.rateapi.dev/v1/decisions', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_API_KEY',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    decision_type: 'financing',
    context: { geo: { state: 'CA' } },
    product_request: {
      product_type: 'mortgage',
      intent: 'purchase',
      amount: 500000,
      term_months: 360
    },
    current_offer: { apr: 6.75 }
  })
});

// Returns: savings, ranked offers, recommendation
200 OK
Loading...

Ranked by true cost (APR + points + fees), not headline rate

Ship Rate Features Without the Infrastructure

🎯

One Request, Five Products

Query mortgages, auto loans, HELOCs, personal loans, or credit cards with the same /v1/decisions call. Swap product_type, filter by state, amount, and term.

📊

Savings Math You Don't Write

Returns monthly savings, lifetime savings, and break-even timelines. Display-ready—no calculations on your end.

⚖️

Ranked by True Cost, by Default

Results come pre-ranked on APR + points + fees. No affiliate order to re-sort, no lead-selling to work around.

🪪

See Who Can Join, Not Just the Rate

Ranking a credit union your user can't join is a dead end. Every ranked offer can carry a membership-eligibility verdict - who can join and how - each backed by a verbatim quote from the credit union's own membership page, with the cost to join. See the eligibility methodology or browse who can join by credit union.

🏠

Affordability, Solved

Turn income, monthly debts, and DTI limits into a max home price. The affordability calculator returns max payment, max loan, and max home price from real credit union rates.

🔁

Refinance, Decided

Answer "should I refinance?" with real numbers. The refinance break-even calculator returns monthly savings, lifetime savings, and break-even months including closing costs from real credit union rates.

🧮

Total Cost, Ranked

Rank lenders by what the loan actually costs, not the headline rate. The total loan cost calculator layers origination/lender fees plus lifetime interest over your holding period onto ranked credit union offers and re-ranks by total cost.

🎚️

Points, Optimized

Weigh discount points against lender credits. The mortgage points calculator returns break-even months, lifetime savings, and the optimal point-spend for a points/lender-credit tradeoff from real credit union rates.

🧾

True Monthly Cost, Estimated

See the full housing payment, not just principal and interest. The monthly cost (PITI) calculator adds property tax, homeowners insurance, and PMI to give the true monthly outlay from real credit union rates.

📉

PMI, Timed Out

For under-20%-down buyers: the PMI removal / equity-timeline tool projects when PMI drops at 78-80% LTV, total PMI paid until then, and the extra monthly payment to reach 80% LTV sooner — from real credit union rates.

🏠

Rent vs Buy, Compared

Weigh renting against owning over your holding period. The rent-vs-buy calculator compares monthly rent vs PITI, projects equity build, and finds the breakeven year — all from real credit union rates.

📅

Amortization & Payoff Schedule

See a loan amortize year by year, the total lifetime interest, and what extra payments do for you. The amortization calculator returns the schedule plus months saved and interest saved — with the market rate from real credit union offers.

🎯

Built for Loan Officers

Know where you rank, watch named competitors, and benchmark the live market — one hub of originator tools. See RateAPI for loan officers, all from real credit union rates.

📈

Competitive Position, Benchmarked

For loan officers and lenders: post your published rate for a state and product and get back a market percentile, basis points vs the median, and a leading/competitive/overpriced verdict. See loan officer benchmarking from real credit union rates.

🏆

Competitive Landscape, Ranked

Go beyond a single benchmark: pull a ranked lender league table of the top N lenders publishing a state and product today — per-lender best APR, position, and basis points above the leader — from real credit union rates.

Buy Now or Wait, Decided

Should you lock now or wait for rates to drop? The buy-vs-wait timing tool combines recent rate movement with break-even sensitivity to return a forward buy/refi-now vs wait recommendation, not just historical deltas.

🔒

Lock or Float, Decided

For a deal already in the pipeline: given a known lock-expiration date, the current locked rate, and the float-down cost, the rate-lock / float-down tool combines recent rate movement with payment and break-even math to return a documentable hold-lock vs exercise-float-down call — not a rate forecast.

🔔

Watch a Named Competitor

Subscribe a monitor to one specific credit union's published rate and get alerted when it moves — not just the market-best decision. The competitor rate monitoring endpoint persists the named CU target and a baseline snapshot, org-scoped via /v1/monitors.

📬

Every Webhook, Tracked & Replayable

Stop losing rate alerts silently. The webhook delivery log shows each delivery's status (delivered/failed/pending), HTTP response code, response time, and timestamp — with a one-call redeliver action to replay a failed delivery, org-scoped via /v1/webhook-deliveries.

📚

Whole Portfolio, Scored at Once

POST an array of inline borrower scenarios and get a ranked financing decision per item in one stateless call. The batch decisions endpoint scores up to 25 scenarios with no persisted cohorts or per-borrower HTTP loops, ranked against real credit union rates.

📖

Every Endpoint, Documented

Browse the full API reference — every public /v1 endpoint for decisions, rate analytics, borrower tools, and monitors, each linked to the live OpenAPI spec so you can generate a typed client in any language.

🕰️

Rate History, Charted

Pull a date-ranged time-series of min/median/max APR per product and state for dashboards, charts, and backtests. The historical rate API returns an array of point-in-time rate points over your chosen window, bounded by data retention.

🗂️

Raw Rates, Queried

The core data primitive integrators expect. The rate query API lists and filters raw rate rows by product, state, lender, and term with limit/offset pagination — one authenticated call to POST /v1/rates returns paginated rate rows straight from real credit union data.

🔔

Rate Alerts, Delivered

Let a borrower say "email me when my target rate hits." The consumer rate alerts funnel takes a target on rate, APR, or monthly payment, confirms via double opt-in, then a daily scan emails them when the live market meets the condition — one-click unsubscribe in every email, via POST /v1/alerts and the subscribe_rate_alert MCP tool.

🗺️

Coverage, Before You Scan

Know what data exists before you query. The data coverage explorer returns a per-segment matrix of which states, lenders, and product types are covered, row counts per segment, and last-updated freshness — via the dashboard, POST /v1/coverage, and the get_coverage MCP tool.

🏦

Deposit & CD Rates, Benchmarked

The liability side, not just loans. Deposit & CD rate benchmarks rank credit-union savings, CD, share-certificate, money-market, and IRA-CD APY by state, product, and term — best/median/spread APY with per-CU peer ranking via the dashboard, POST /v1/deposit-rates, and the get_deposit_benchmarks MCP tool. Deposits quote APY, not APR.

🛡️

ALM & Rate-Risk Models, Grounded

The external published-rate data layer for your ALM and interest-rate-risk model. Rate data for ALM supplies nationwide credit-union deposit APY and loan rates, competitive position, and peer benchmarks to calibrate deposit-beta, repricing, and competitive-pricing assumptions — the rate-DATA feed, not the NEV/NII/rate-shock engine, and never any member data.

📐

Deposit Beta, Measured

The single most-requested ALM input, derived — not guessed. Deposit beta measures how deposit APY reprices per 100bps of market-rate move, computed from RateAPI's retained published rate history via POST /v1/deposit-beta and the get_deposit_beta MCP tool. Short-window today with an honest depth caveat; full-cycle beta is on the roadmap — the rate-DATA feed, not the modeling engine.

Up and Running in 10 Seconds

Or test the API interactively at api.rateapi.dev

1

Get Started

Sign up and get your API key in seconds.

$terminal
# Basic (20 requests/month)
curl -X POST https://api.rateapi.dev/keys
# With email for 2.5x more requests (50/month)
curl -X POST https://api.rateapi.dev/keys \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"email": "[email protected]"}'
{}response
{
"id": "a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"key": "rk_live_abc123...",
"message": "Store this key securely - it cannot be retrieved again",
"tier": { "name": "Free", "limit": 50 },
"emailRegistered": true
}

Free tier includes 20 requests/month (or 50 with email).

Get Notified When Rates Drop

Set conditions. Receive HMAC-signed webhooks with full decision context—not just "rate changed." Configurable cooldowns, dry-run testing, MCP integration.

{}webhook payload
// POST to your webhook URL
// Headers: X-RateAPI-Signature, X-RateAPI-Event-Id
{
"event": "decision.monitor.triggered",
"monitor_id": "mon_abc123",
"why_now": [
"APR dropped below 6.25% threshold (now 6.125%)",
"A lender is offering $127/mo savings vs current"
],
"rate_change": {
"state": "CA",
"previous_rate": 6.375,
"new_rate": 6.125
},
"decision_snapshot": { /* full /v1/decisions response */ }
}

From client scenario to shareable report in three steps

1

Enter your client's scenario

Pick a product and enter the basics—loan amount, state, term. No code, no API key to manage.

2

See every lender ranked by true cost

APR plus points and fees—not ad spend. The top option is genuinely the best for your client.

3

Save it and export a client report

Save the scenario and hand your client a clean, printable report they can keep.

Get Rates Wherever You Work

However you work—in code, a browser, chat, or an AI assistant—it's the same daily, true-cost-ranked data.

🤖

MCP for AI Agents

Wire live rates into Claude, ChatGPT, and AI agents. Explore MCP →

🧩

Embeddable Widgets

Drop live rate tables onto any site—no code. Explore widgets →

Common Questions

Start with the real best rate

Developers ship in an afternoon. Loan officers compare in minutes. Both free, no credit card.

Open the Compare Tool →