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What are mortgage rates and how are they calculated? A Complete Guide
The basics of mortgage rates: Key factors explained
Emily Craig spent much of 2023 unemployed. Her benefits ran out shortly before the holiday season began.
“I was really struggling,” said Craig, 34, who lives in Woodstock, Virginia. “It affects your mental health, it affects your social life. You can’t go out and do anything. Everything costs money. And it gets really discouraging.”
But in December of 2023 she got a glimmer of hope. A job she’d applied – and been rejected for – reopened. She pounced, and this time got good news: a job as a recruiter at a company with what she calls an “amazing” culture. A few months later, her luck changed again. She had been thinking of buying a home just as the owner of a 126-year-old charmer started thinking about selling.
“My realtor said if I didn’t buy it, she would,” Craig told USA TODAY.
The decision to become a homeowner is complicated, Craig thinks. For her, it meant “being able to call something mine and knowing that if I put money into an improvement in the house, I’m doing that for myself, not for my landlord. I think it’s a great investment opportunity, but I’m also able to put down roots in a community that I have really fallen in love with.”
Across America, that dream – putting down roots, investing a little sweat equity, watching the nest egg grow steadily – is in peril. The housing market is so tight that home sales in 2023 were the lowest in three decades. A decade of underbuilding after the subprime crisis, stringent local zoning laws and regulations, tariffs on building materials, and many more factors have all taken a toll.
It’s not just housing for sale that’s struggling, either. Recent research confirms what many Americans have long felt: renting can be so expensive that it makes saving for a down payment and closing costs nearly impossible.
With so many headwinds working against people like Emily Craig, her story can seem out of the ordinary, if not impossible. But housing experts also think the situation has gotten so dire that Washington may be compelled to act.
“There are many ways in which this housing affordability crisis deeply affects families,” said Shaun Donovan, CEO and president of Enterprise Community Partners, who served as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration.
“It’s affecting everyone in our society in a way that again I’ve never seen in three decades of doing this work. What is different now is that it is now just about everywhere, in Idaho and Montana and rural New Mexico and the northwest and so on. So there is a political imperative that is much broader than I’ve ever seen around housing.”
Avoiding expensive areas
While some young Americans, like Craig, stumble on opportunities or get lucky otherwise, others have simply set their sights on something other than ownership. Mason Dorrian, 24, graduated from Ohio State University with a master’s degree in accounting in 2024. He moved back in with his parents in Columbus, Ohio, while he searches for a job.
As a number cruncher, Dorrian recognizes the financial stability ownership can bring, but says he prizes the ability to chase opportunities at this stage in his life, and is in no rush to put down roots. But even some of the familiar early-stage steps his parents took feel out of reach for him, he said.
“My mom was able to do an internship in New York City, and you might have been able to look at a job 20 years ago and say, I’d love to try this for however amount of time. Whereas today there’s just certain places that I as a young person just haven’t looked at,” Dorrian said.
New York “seems like a great place to be and I have friends that have moved there for work, but it just doesn’t seem like you can actually have a life that you want and really grow as a person with how expensive things are,” he said. “I think you continue to see that with where people my age are moving.”
The federal government plays a key role in helping Americans achieve homeownership. Emily Craig was able to secure a mortgage from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which offers loans in certain rural areas of the country. In the past few years, the quasi-governmental agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have backed approximately 40% of all new mortgages, and the Federal Housing Administration, which is a government agency, has insured an additional one-quarter of them.
But Washington has a big hand in all corners of the housing ecosystem. HUD spends billions every year helping state and local governments develop affordable rental housing through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, for example. And Freddie Mac is particularly active in multifamily development: in the third quarter of 2024, for example, the company provided financing for 131,000 rental units, two-thirds of which were affordable to low-income families, according to its financial statements.
Veterans of the Washington housing complex see a continuum of needs – and solutions.
“I think ultimately for 90% of the people, home ownership is probably the dream,” said Ted Tozer, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. Tozer spent seven years during the Obama administration running Ginnie Mae, the agency within HUD that guarantees mortgages issued by the Federal Housing Administration, USDA and others.
“But there are a lot of people that for whatever reason want to rent,” Tozer told USA TODAY. “The job that the government should have is making sure people have as many opportunities as possible so they can take advantage of their options.”
While housing was mentioned in the presidential debates, Vice President Kamala Harris’ platform included the construction of 3 million new units and down payment assistance. President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign said Trump would stop the flow into the U.S. of immigrants lacking permanent legal status, which he says is driving up housing costs, and free up some federal land for development. Some experts told USA TODAY neither candidate hit the mark when it came to housing. Trump carried the popular vote in a presidential election where voters cited the economy as a key issue.
In November, Trump tapped Scott Turner, a former NFL player who ran the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Trump’s first term, for HUD secretary. The council was instrumental in launching federal tax incentives for economically depressed areas dubbed “Opportunity Zones.”
The incoming administration needs to dial back a lot of its “populist rhetoric,” Tozer said, and “get practical.” Deporting immigrants, many of whom have been working productively here for years and have family members in the U.S., would crush the construction industry, he said. “When I talk to builders, they tell me their biggest challenge right now is not that they don’t have people want to buy their homes. It’s the fact they can’t build them faster because they can’t hire the people.”
‘A dream delayed’ in part by student loan debt
Nicole Robinson, 26, already owns a home with her husband. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, and works for the county school system. Robinson believes homeownership is still a part of the American dream, with a big caveat.
“I just don’t think it’s attainable for that many people anymore so people are sacrificing other things,” she said. In most cases, that means they can afford children or a house – but not both. It’s not just the cost of homes that limit what people can afford, Robinson said: It’s also student loan debt. She knows many people who are saddled with “tens of thousands” of dollars in debt in their late 20s.
“For older generations that seek to guide us on the American dream I would hope that they would have some patience, not say things like you need to have a house and kids by a certain age,” Robinson told USA TODAY. “Maybe we can only have one or some people can have neither. I think it hurts us in the long run to chase the old version of the American dream as opposed to tailoring it to what we can afford now.”
As of earlier this year, the median “all-in” cost of a mortgage payment, property taxes, and insurance was $2,201, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. That’s up a whopping $852 in just the past three years, and JCHS estimates it’s the highest since data first started to be collected over three decades ago.
That represents a “generational shift,” said Brian Montgomery, who served as HUD deputy secretary during Trump’s first administration, and FHA commissioner for other presidents. Montgomery also looks at the stagnant level of home sales, due in large part to people who already have homes being locked into ultra-low mortgage rates. “Those are some pretty sobering statistics.”
Asked whether homeownership can still be the American dream, Montgomery said “I think yes. But it’s a dream delayed for a lot of families.”
Montgomery thinks there’s a place for Washington to help the most vulnerable Americans with housing: Not just low-income households, but seniors, he noted. The federal government could encourage innovations in housing construction, like manufactured homes, he thinks, and to work on streamlining regulations.
Still, he said, one of the biggest issues facing the market is high interest rates that keep first-time buyers out and existing homeowners stuck in place. “You know, there’s no silver bullet right now to fix homeownership,” Montgomery said.
‘I don’t think the dream is dead’
Craig knows as well as anyone that there’s no magic wand. She’s proud of the work she’s done so far, and knows homeownership is a lifetime commitment. As she puts it, “there really is a light at the end of the tunnel, and the hard work has just started. Trust me, I was at the house scraping 50-year-old contact paper out of the shelves in my kitchen until 10:00 p.m. last night.”
In some ways her story might sum up the American dream as well as anyone’s: a helping hand up and a safety net when she was down, but a lot of pluck and perseverance of her own.
“I actually appreciate the assistance that I’ve been able to get from our government programs,” Craig said. “I think that the people who are able to do it take advantage of the programs that are available. You have to do your research and you have to advocate for yourself and you have to figure out what’s going to work best for your situation. I don’t think the dream is dead.”
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