Newly Tracked 4.50% One-Year CD Leads as Verified Bank Rates Hold Steady

Newly Tracked 4.50% One-Year CD Leads as

Verified Bank Rates Hold Steady

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2026 | Completed 5 AM first-party refresh | Latest official market benchmarks: October 15–16

Executive summary. OnlineBankRates added six verified institutions, bringing coverage to 102, and appended 218 Bank

Verified observations. A controlled comparison of 31 exact-equivalent deposit products found zero increases, zero cuts and

31 unchanged APYs. Newly captured Hanscom Federal Credit Union offers a 4.50% 12-month certificate; that is a new baseline, not a rate increase. The highest fresh liquid-savings headline remains 6.00% with school-employee restrictions; broadly accessible savings reaches 4.20%.

1 / Rate Environment

Deposit pricing is stable within the measured matched panel: 0.0% increased, 100.0% were unchanged and 0.0% declined among 31 verified exact-equivalent observations. The six newly added institutions do not enter the change denominator.

Borrowing benchmarks are mixed: Treasury yields fell across two, five and ten years on October 16, while the latest 30-year mortgage average held at 7.40%.

2 / Today's Numbers

Treasury yields are dated Friday, October 16; the overnight and mortgage observations are dated October 15. No Sunday market print is implied.

3 / Biggest Verified Moves

The 31 unchanged matches comprise 11 Bank5 Connect products and 20 Alliant Credit Union products. Geographic descriptions for Bank5

Connect and equivalent membership wording for Alliant were normalized; all matched product names, maturities, balance tiers and APYs were retained. Twenty other existing-institution recaptures lacked sufficiently equivalent terms; 167 records were new-institution baselines. The source change ledger independently reported no verified changes.

3 / Biggest Moves — Seven-Day Context

For the October 12–18 collection window, previously published daily comparable audits plus today's controlled matches total

5 increases, 325 unchanged observations and no cuts (1.5% / 98.5% / 0.0%). These are observation-pairs, not unique products; daily coverage and normalization differ. The largest verified rises in this window were four Alliant 12-month certificate variants (+20 basis points each, captured October 16) and Happen Bank's 24-month CD (+16 basis points to

4.76%, captured October 16). No exact-comparable cut was verified in the window. Neither was newly repriced today.

4 / Where Savers Are Winning

The 6.00% SchoolsFirst Paycheck Planner is not counted as a standard fixed-term CD because its maturity is unspecified. Blue FCU's 9-month certificate promotion is quarantined because two official sources disagree on its opening minimum; it is not included among leaders.

5 / Borrower Watch

Freddie Mac's October 15 survey reports a 7.40% 30-year fixed mortgage average, unchanged week over week. The 15-year average eased two basis points to 6.71%. The indicative 30-year mortgage minus 10-year Treasury spread is 231 basis points using Friday's 5.09% Treasury yield; the mortgage and Treasury observations are one day apart. Prime is 7.00%, 312 basis points above the latest 3.88% effective funds rate, while SOFR is 3.89%.

6 / Yield Curve / CD Strategy

The strongest captured one- and two-year CDs narrowly outyield corresponding Treasury par yields, while Treasuries lead at five and ten years.

Liquid broad savings pays 4.20% but remains variable and more accessible. Treasury par yields and bank APYs use different return conventions; tax treatment, market-price risk, deposit insurance, liquidity and withdrawal penalties matter.

7 / Bank Behavior

No institution category produced a verified rate change in today's matched panel. All 31 unchanged matches came from one online-oriented bank and one credit union; six new credit unions contributed 167 baseline records, which do not measure repricing speed. A category-wide fastest-moving ranking is therefore not supportable.

Groups are manually classified and nonrandom; savings includes restricted, capped and high-minimum tiers. Credit-union membership requirements apply. These means are descriptive of the observed fresh panel, not nationwide averages.

8 / OnlineBankRates Takeaway

Today's bank-rate update is about new choices, not widespread repricing. Six credit unions joined the tracked database, including Hanscom Federal Credit Union, whose freshly captured 12-month certificate pays 4.50%. But a new listing is not a rate increase: all 31 closely matched products in today's audit kept their previous APYs. The strongest broadly accessible savings offer remains 4.20%, while higher headline savings yields of 5.00% and 6.00% come with balance caps, activity requirements or school-employee eligibility. Among CDs, the leading two-year offer pays 4.76%, slightly above the two-year

Treasury yield; longer-term Treasuries retain a nominal advantage. Mortgage borrowing is still costly, with the latest 30-year average at 7.40%. Compare account terms, liquidity and the effective date behind every advertised yield.

9 / Proprietary Metrics and Trend

The Savings Index fell 12 basis points and the CD Index rose five basis points from yesterday. Those are cross-sectional panel differences, not verified same-bank rate movements. The v2 methodology began October 8; earlier v1 values remain preserved and should not be compared directly.

10 / Data Coverage

New institutions: Blue Federal Credit Union (5 observations); Desert Financial Credit Union (26); Elevations Credit Union (10); First Community

Credit Union–Missouri (31); Hanscom Federal Credit Union (55); Lafayette Federal Credit Union (40).

Collection limitations: This was a partial refresh. Only two previously known official URLs were rechecked; eight institutions received numerical recaptures. Six source-issue rows include Blue FCU's two conflicting disclosures, Redwood CU's non-rendering rate table, Apple FCU's incomplete term grid, and two discovery-only leads (Associated Bank and Lake Michigan CU). No third-party rates were substituted.

Methodology / Publication Disclosure

Freshness and verification. FRESH means an official rate-effective date within seven days; AGING is 8–30 days; STALE exceeds 30 days;

UNDATED lacks a usable official effective date. Fresh-only indexes and leaderboards exclude aging, stale, undated and quarantined observations. Bank Verified denotes institution-owned provenance, not a guarantee that a rate remains available at the moment of publication.

Proprietary indexes. Savings Index v2 = unweighted average of each fresh institution's highest verified personal savings APY (including clearly disclosed restricted/capped offers); CD Index v2 = unweighted average of each institution's highest fresh standard exact-12-month

CD/certificate APY, excluding deferred compensation. Best Cash Yield = highest fresh personal savings/money-market APY, excluding checking.

Because the panels change, index movements do not necessarily measure repricing.

Breadth and pending scores. Rate Breadth = counts of positive, zero and negative APY changes across matched institution/product/maturity/balance/eligibility/geography observations, with controlled normalization only for equivalent terms. Fed

Pass-Through Score = fixed-cohort average deposit-APY change divided by matched-period EFFR change; not reported without adequate pre/post-policy data. Online-vs-National Premium = comparable online-bank minus large-national-bank mean APY; withheld until balanced cohorts exist. Seven-day breadth aggregates daily observation-pairs, not unique products.

Consumer disclosure. APYs, eligibility, membership, account limits and penalties may change. Treasury yields and deposit APYs differ in compounding, taxation, liquidity and risk characteristics. This report provides general market information, not personalized financial advice.

Official Sources

U.S. Treasury, October 16 daily par yield curve | Federal Reserve H.15 / prime

New York Fed, effective fed funds | New York Fed, SOFR

Freddie Mac, October 15 PMMS | Hanscom Federal Credit Union official rates

Bank5 Connect official rates | Alliant Credit Union official rates

Happen Bank official deposit rates | SchoolsFirst official employee product rates

Compare deposit options

Verified CD rates · Savings rates · Savings calculator

Linked source evidence

• https://freddiemac.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mortgage-rates-hold-steady-740
• https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?field_tdr_date_value=2026&type=daily_treasury_yield_curve
• https://www.alliantcreditunion.org/rates
• https://www.bank5connect.com/rates
• https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/
• https://www.happen.com/personal-deposits/account-rates
• https://www.hfcu.org/rates/account-rates.html
• https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/effr
• https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/reference-rates/sofr
• https://www.schoolsfirstfcu.org/rates/school-employee-products/

Archive note: Coverage, historical counts, indexes, and market benchmarks above describe the supplied collection report, not the website’s total holdings or a new check of every institution. Rates and restrictions may have changed since the stated dates.