You see a mortgage rate in a headline. Then a lender quotes you something higher. Nothing went wrong. The two numbers were never the same thing.

A headline rate is an average, pulled from many loans made to strong borrowers. Your rate is a price built for you, on the day you ask, by the lender you ask.

What actually sets your rate?

The CFPB lists the pieces plainly. Your credit score. The size of your down payment. Your loan amount. The state and county where you buy. The length of the loan. Whether the rate is fixed or can move later. And the loan type, such as conventional, FHA, or VA.

The agency makes the same point itself: it is not any one of these factors but the combination of them that together determine your interest rate.

Some of these you control. You can save a bigger down payment or pick a shorter term. Some you do not control at all, like where the house sits.

How wide is the spread?

Wider than most people expect. The CFPB’s rate tool shows offers as a range, not a single number.

In one example on that tool, a borrower with a 625 credit score saw offers from 6.125% to 8.875%. A borrower with a 700 score saw 5.875% to 8.125%. Those figures come from lender data dated April 1, 2025, so treat them as an illustration, not today’s market. They are interest rates only. Each one would carry a higher APR, the yearly cost of the loan once points and fees are counted, and the tool does not publish the fees behind them.

The point is the shape, not the digits. Even one borrower profile maps to a band of prices, not a price.

Does it matter who you ask?

Yes, and this is the part people miss. The same borrower, on the same day, can get different prices from different lenders. The CFPB calls this price dispersion, which means different firms charging different prices for the same product.

Its 2023 analysis found that spread is “often around 50 basis points of the annual percentage rate.” That is half a percentage point, just for picking a different company.

Half a point is real money. On a $300,000 loan, the CFPB put the gap between 6.5% and 7.0% at about $100 a month.

Why do people believe rates are the same everywhere?

Because most borrowers were never told otherwise. The CFPB points to survey work showing that most people who recently got a mortgage believed they would pay the same price no matter which lender they chose.

That belief shapes behavior. The largest single group of borrowers seriously consider only one lender, and few consider more than two.

Does the Federal Reserve set your rate?

No government source on this page says it does. The CFPB’s own list of what determines your rate does not mention the Federal Reserve at all. Every factor it names is about you, your loan, or the lender you pick. So a Fed announcement does not hand you a number, and waiting for one is not a substitute for asking lenders what they will charge you.

What this means for you

Stop treating the news rate as your rate. Treat it as weather, not as a quote.

Ask at least three lenders for a real quote on the same loan, on the same day, with the same points. Get it in writing on a Loan Estimate so you are comparing the same thing.

Then run your own numbers. On this $320,000 loan at 6.5%, an illustrative 6.59% APR if the lender charges $3,000 in fees, principal and interest work out to $2,023 a month. Over the first 5 years that loan costs roughly $104,112, and over 30 years about $411,342.

Change the loan amount or the rate in the box above and watch those figures move. That is the whole lesson. Small differences in the rate are not small at all once you spread them over a loan.

No site can promise you a rate, and this one will not try. What you can do is make lenders compete for your loan in writing.