Where to Find a Mortgage Rate Under 5%

NEW YORK (RateWatch) – It wouldn’t be fair to say that mortgage rates are high right now, but we can be forgiven for getting a little spoiled. After all, it was just four months ago that the interest rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage bottomed out at 4.3%. But in the past few months rates have started to climb again, and today they stand at an average of 5.03%, according to RateWatch.

Again: That’s not exactly high. But the glory days of cheap mortgages may indeed be behind us, and that spike of over seventy basis points (hundredths of a percentage point) in the space of four months has been a bit of a jolt.

Fortunately, there are still a few states where the days of interest rates in the 4% range are still a glorious reality. In some cases, that’s because the state in question has always had low rates – the best state in the country for mortgages, North Carolina, got as low as 3.557% back in October. Meanwhile, other states have simply shown stability in the face of rising rates – Vermont, for instance, has only seen mortgage rates rise 20 basis points during the past four months as the rest of the country saw rates rise nearly four times faster. 

Here, then, are the five best and worst states for getting a 30-year fixed mortgage, as measured by the state-by-state average gathered by RateWatch in February. Note that states with fewer than 100 lenders were excluded from the rankings to ensure statistical validity, and that averages are based on the most recent rate gathered from each bank in the month of February.