Mortgage rates are driven by the bond market. Although bonds just experienced moderate, constant weakness throughout the day, home loan rates stumbled greater by an amount normally seen when the market is reacting to big, breaking news.
However there wasn’t any of that sort of news on tap today– just downbeat updates that strengthened a longer timeline for geopolitical interruptions. The bigger issue for home loan rates is that they often experience heightened volatility when they travel through the 6.25% level.
Due to the underlying structure of the home loan market, 6.25% is sort of a dead zone. If you actually want to see the nuts and bolts behind that phenomenon, here’s the primer. The useful result is that motion tends to be larger when rates are rising or failing 6.25% (or any level that ends with 0.25 or 0.75). As such, when rates started going up from 6.125%, the somewhat elevated bond market volatility made for a quicker journey up to the 6.375% zone (today’s MND index was modified up to 6.35% in the afternoon after ending Monday at 6.14%).
This is the greatest level since December 8th, 2025, though it must be kept in mind that previous to September 2025, rates had been much greater, typically, for approximately an entire year.