Mortgage rates just keep climbing

SALT LAKE CITY — Mortgage rates are continuing to go up.

After a fifth straight week of increases, the weekly average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in the U.S. hit 7.03% Thursday, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac.

It's the first time the mortgage giant's weekly average has been above 7% since January 2025, but mortgage rates tracked daily had reached that level earlier this month and have just kept climbing.

At Mortgage News Daily, the rate for the same type of mortgage was posted at 7.37% on Thursday, a 0.11% increase from the previous daily index. The last time the site reported a rate that high was nearly 2 1/2 years ago.

Crossing the 7% threshold for rates is seen as having more of a psychological impact on buyers, but the added expense comes at a time when homeownership is increasingly out of reach for many Americans.

In Utah, the nation's 10th most expensive housing market, the estimated average monthly mortgage payment of $3,669 on a home is beyond what some 91% of renters in the state can afford, a new report from the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute found.

Mortgage rates were heading down at the start of the year, briefly dropping below 6% for the first time since 2022. But then the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran, fueling the economic uncertainty that's driving up the government bond yields tied to mortgage rates.

Thursday, NBC News reported oil prices rose to as much as $108 a barrel, sending the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note surging as high as 5.18% in early trading, a level not seen for nearly 20 years.

The increase in mortgage rates between late February adds roughly $276 to the monthly payment on a $400,000 home loan based on the latest weekly average rate, The Associated Press calculated.

But the added cost of more than $99,000 over 30 years could increase. Mortgage rates are "far more likely to go up than down by the end of the year or in the next month or two," Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com, told CBS News.

But Krimmel said home prices may be going in a different direction. Prices were cut on more than 1 in 5 homes on the market in August, he told CBS, reductions that could add up to more "than the gains from what you might get on saving 10 or 12 points on your interest rate."

In Utah, a sluggish housing market is seeing more seller concessions, including mortgage rate buy-downs starting to show up in individual real estate transactions, Salt Lake Board of Realtors President Scott Colemere told the Deseret News last week.

"I hope we don't see 8%," Colemere said then, adding that it is "just too difficult to try to peg what's going to happen in the next five or six months. Definitely there's uncertainty in this market."

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