Rate exposure

Does what they pay follow the Fed?

The dashed line is the federal funds rate, the same in all four panels. The solid line is the rate each borrower is actually paying on the debt it already has. Each panel is on its own scale; read the solid line against the dashed one beside it.

How much of the Fed's move reached each borrower

Change in the rate paid, from the last full quarter before the first move to 8 quarters later, or the latest quarter if the cycle is younger. The dashed line is the Fed's own move over the same window. A bar reaching it means the whole move got through. The largest move in the set is the hikes from March 2022.

Q2 2024 to Q2 2026.

What is waiting to reprice

Why the shapes differ: how much of each borrower's debt can change rate soon.

Home mortgages

Share of outstanding mortgage balances by contract rate, quarterly from Q1 2013. Adjustable-rate loans are 6.9% of balances in Q1 2026; 49.1% carry a rate below 4%. A new 30-year mortgage cost 6.76% in the week of September 10, 2026.

Credit cards

Card rates are set from the prime rate, which moves with the Fed, and apply to the whole balance within a billing cycle or two. All of it reprices, so there is nothing to chart: the share would be a flat line at 100%.

Federal government

Share of marketable Treasury debt that matures or resets within twelve months, monthly from January 2001: bills, floating-rate notes, and notes, bonds and TIPS in their final year.

The same debt as of August 2026, by the year it matures. 34.3% falls within twelve months.

Corporations

Share of nonfinancial corporate debt that is loans rather than bonds and other securities, quarterly from Q1 2001, from the Fed's Financial Accounts. Loans mostly float and bonds mostly do not, so this is a proxy for what can reprice, not a measurement: loans include commercial mortgages that are often fixed (9.4% of debt in Q2 2026), and swaps that convert one into the other are invisible here.

What is measured

For each borrower, one number: the interest rate being paid on the debt already outstanding, as opposed to the rate a new borrower would be quoted today. When the Fed moves, this number moves only as fast as the debt reprices: floating-rate debt within weeks, maturing debt when it rolls, long fixed-rate debt not at all until it is paid off and replaced. The question is how much of each Fed move has reached this number, and how fast.

Pass-through for a cycle is the change in the rate paid divided by the change in the federal funds rate, both measured from the same starting quarter. One means the whole move got through; zero means none of it did; above one means the borrower's rate moved further than the Fed's.

The cycle rule

The rule was fixed before any result was read, and is applied identically to every cycle and every borrower, so that differences between borrowers come from how their debt is built and not from how long the Fed held rates.

• A cycle starts at the first change in the federal funds target in the opposite direction from the previous change. Cycles are detected mechanically from the daily target series, from 2004.
• The starting point is the last full quarter before that first move, so the base is untouched by it.
• The headline is read 8 quarters later. If the cycle is younger, the latest quarter with data is used and the bar says so. If the next cycle begins sooner, the window stops at that cycle's starting quarter.
• The denominator is the federal funds effective rate, averaged over each quarter, for every borrower, so the shock is the same for all. Each borrower's own market rate is not used as a denominator.
• No ratio is shown while the Fed's cumulative move is under a quarter point, because dividing by nearly nothing produces nonsense.

The rate each borrower pays

• Home mortgages. The average contract rate on all outstanding residential mortgages, weighted by unpaid balance, from the FHFA's National Mortgage Database, a 5% sample of the market. Quarterly at quarter end, published to one decimal, from 2013. Adjustable-rate loans are included at their contract rate.
• Credit cards. The Fed's G.19 interest rate on all credit card accounts at commercial banks, a survey taken in February, May, August and November. Balances that pay no interest are in the average, which is why it sits below the rate on accounts assessed interest.
• Federal government. Treasury's own published average interest rate on total marketable debt, monthly, from 2001. Quarterly values for the pass-through are the average of the three months.
• Corporations. Interest expense divided by total debt, summed across US-incorporated nonfinancial firms in Compustat, using the trailing four quarters so that year-end true-ups in reported interest do not show as rate moves. Firms with no interest expense reported in a quarter are left out of that quarter; the remainder carry 97.6% of the debt in Q2 2026. Listed firms only.

The four are measured at slightly different moments within a quarter and the corporate figure is a trailing average. At an eight-quarter horizon these differences are small next to the differences between borrowers, but they would matter at one or two quarters.

Colour

A bar is red when at least half of the Fed's move has reached that borrower by the horizon, green when less than half has. Half is a convention, chosen so that the two colours read as "mostly through" and "mostly not"; the bars carry the actual figure.

What it does not say

• This is the cash-flow channel: what borrowers pay on debt they already have. It says nothing about what markets charge for new debt, or about bond prices and yields, which move for other reasons as well.
• Each figure is an aggregate. A household with a paid-off house and savings on deposit gains from a hike while one with a card balance loses. The distribution across households is not shown.
• The federal figure is the Treasury alone. Consolidating the Federal Reserve, whose reserves and reverse repos reprice overnight against a portfolio of long fixed-rate securities, would raise the public sector's exposure. That consolidation is not built here.
• The corporate figure is a gross interest rate on debt for listed firms. Many of them also hold cash that earned more as rates rose, so theirnet interest cost moved less, and for some fell. Interest-rate swaps that convert fixed to floating or back are invisible in these data, which is also why the loan share in the third section is a proxy for floating-rate debt rather than a measurement of it.
• Mortgage data begin in 2013, so the 2004 and 2007 cycles have no mortgage reading. FHFA publishes the rate to one decimal, so a mortgage change of 0.5 points could be anywhere from about 0.4 to 0.6.
• Not covered at all: auto and student loans, small business and commercial real estate borrowing, and state and local governments. Small business and commercial real estate are where floating-rate borrowing is heaviest and public data thinnest.
• The pass-through at 8 quarters is a snapshot, not a structural constant. It depends on how much debt happened to roll in that window. The share of debt waiting to reprice, shown in the third section, is the forward-looking half of the same question.

Every series is published. What is constructed here is the common frame: the same cycle rule, the same base quarter, the same denominator, applied to four borrowers whose data are normally read apart.

We built this measure, so we host its data. The corporate series is an aggregate ratio; the firm-level Compustat data behind it are licensed and not included.