What Local Banks Are Charging in Western Mass

This Week's Advertised Rates

"Points (Fee)" is discount points, what the bank charges up front to buy the rate down. "Against National" is the difference between that bank's rate and the national average, in percentage points. A row whose read date lags the survey date is a lender whose page could not be read this week; the previous figure is kept rather than guessed, and it says so by carrying its own older date. Past two weeks the row is marked; past 35 days it leaves this table rather than sit here under a heading that says this week.

Do Local Banks Beat the National Average?

This week 4 of 5 do. The widest margin is Pittsfield Cooperative Bank, advertising 6.125% against a national average of 6.66%, a gap of 0.535 percentage points in the borrower's favour. On a $400,000 loan over thirty years, a difference of that size is real money, and it is the reason a national average is a starting point rather than an answer.

The national figure is Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey, a national average for a borrower with strong credit and twenty percent down. A local advertised rate is that lender's own headline number on the same basis. Neither is a quote, and both move.

Local Against National, Week by Week

What local lenders advertise, against the national average, every week this survey has run. Nobody else records this: it is not published anywhere and cannot be reconstructed after the fact, so the archive only goes back as far as the survey does.

The local line moves only when a bank on this list changes its rate. Adding a bank to the survey, or losing one, does not move it: each week's change is measured across the banks that appear in that week and the week before it, so the line answers "did rates move" rather than "did the list change". Every figure behind it is on the week by week record, which also downloads as a CSV.

Every Lender in the Survey

Each lender has its own page: what it advertises now, what it has advertised every week since the survey began, and how that has compared with the national average.

• Pittsfield Cooperative Bank mortgage rates
• Florence Bank mortgage rates
• Polish National Credit Union mortgage rates
• Greenfield Co-operative Bank mortgage rates
• Country Bank mortgage rates

What This Costs You, Town by Town

A rate is only half the monthly payment. The other half is the town's property tax, which varies more across these 101 towns than any lender's rate does. Put a price and a town into the cost of ownership calculator and it uses this week's national average and the town's real rate, or read the tax bill on one price in all 101 towns.