Who has the lowest (and highest) mortgage rates, and more!

Americans dance to the beat of their own drummers. And by “their own drummers,” we mean interest rates, the disarming little numbers that quietly dictate the tempo of our lives.

When the Fed pushed its target rate near zero in 2020, the average home buyer could get a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for less than 3 percent. Nearly all of us - 93 percent - were paying more than the market suddenly offered.So, we all moved or refinanced. And the housing market went haywire.

Fast forward four years and the problem has flipped: New mortgages go for about 7 percent and virtually all of us - about 97 percent - pay less than we could get today. This is according to a big honkin’ analysis of a representative sample of more than 14 million mortgages from 1998 to 2023 produced by our fine friends at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, economists Ross Batzer, Jonah Coste, William Doerner and Michael Seiler.

Good interest rates have suddenly became precious. They’re the ultimate bulwark against still-high inflation.

So, who’s got the lowest mortgage rates?

California and Utah homeowners pay just 3.7 percent, while West Virginia and Mississippi pay 4.4 percent - underscoring the reality that higher rates correlate with the usual suspects: low incomes, low levels of education and high unemployment.

Folks in those struggling states tend to qualify for higher interest rates, the economists say, accounting for about a third of the gap in mortgage rates. The rest is a matter of timing: folks in struggling states got loans when rates were higher, and didn’t (or couldn’t) refinance.

“This group is slightly disproportionately from lower socioeconomic status groups as these groups are less likely, and in some cases unable, to refinance,” said FHFA’s Coste, whose earnest and careful speech...