Average CD Rate by Term Length

"Average CD rate" depends entirely on which term you mean

Most "best CD rates" pages answer a shopping question: which bank pays the most right now. This answers a different one: what does a typical CD actually pay, term by term, using the FDIC's own published national average for each term length, not a single blended number. The national average doesn't rise smoothly with term length either — it peaks at 1 year, then declines for longer terms.

Methodology

For each CD term, the national average is the FDIC's own National Rate series for that exact term (published on FRED, e.g. NDR12MCD for 12-month), not derived from SwitchWize's own scraped data. The top-available rate is a top-3 average across SwitchWize's tracked institutions' own rates for that exact term, from each institution's real term ladder -- no nearest-term substitution, unlike the single-term cd-spread index this dataset complements.

Terms where fewer than 3 tracked institutions report a rate for that exact month count still compute a top average from however many are available; institutionsTracked reports the real sample size so a thin term isn't mistaken for a broad one. The FDIC series updates monthly; tracked-institution rates can change daily, so the gap between the two can look different day to day even when neither figure is stale.

Sources

• FDIC National Rate CD series, by term, via FRED (e.g. NDR12MCD) — The FDIC's own population-weighted national-average CD rate, published per term, most recent observation 2026-09-01.
• SwitchWize tracked institution set — Top-3-average CD rate per term across tracked institutions, from live rate_observations, bucketed by exact term match.

Educational information, not personalized financial advice. Rates are illustrative of current market conditions and should be confirmed with the provider.