Mortgage and refinance interest rates today, June 15, 2025: Rates hardly move
Mortgage rates are a notch higher today. According to Zillow, the average 30-year fixed interest rate ticked up one basis point to 6.73%, while the 15-year fixed rate gained four basis points to 6.00%.
The Mortgage Bankers Association's latest forecast is for 30-year rates to remain mostly unchanged and near 6.7% through September, ending the year close to 6.6%. In other words, not changing much. However, increasing international tensions might impact that prediction. Regardless, if you're looking to buy in 2025, you'll want to work to earn the lowest mortgage rate you deserve.
Dig deeper: 6 steps to choosing the right mortgage lender
Have questions about buying, owning, or selling a house? Submit your question to Yahoo's panel of Realtors using this Google form.
Here are the current mortgage rates, according to the latest Zillow data:
30-year fixed: 6.73%
20-year fixed: 6.52%
15-year fixed: 6.00%
5/1 ARM: 6.96%
7/1 ARM: 7.40%
30-year VA: 6.36%
15-year VA: 5.76%
5/1 VA: 6.36%
Remember, these are the national averages and rounded to the nearest hundredth.
These are today's mortgage refinance rates, according to the latest Zillow data:
30-year fixed: 6.81%
20-year fixed: 6.28%
15-year fixed: 6.02%
5/1 ARM: 7.32%
7/1 ARM: 7.13%
30-year VA: 6.35%
15-year VA: 5.94%
5/1 VA: 6.18%
Again, the numbers provided are national averages rounded to the nearest hundredth. Mortgage refinance rates are often higher than rates when you buy a house, although that's not always the case.
Read more: Is now a good time to refinance your mortgage?
Use the mortgage calculator below to see how various mortgage terms and interest rates will impact your monthly payments.
Our free mortgage calculator also considers factors like property taxes and homeowners insurance when determining your estimated monthly mortgage payment. This gives you a more realistic idea of your total monthly payment than if you just looked at mortgage principal and interest.
The average 30-year mortgage rate today is 6.73%. A 30-year term is the most popular type of mortgage because by spreading out your payments over 360 months, your monthly payment is lower than with a shorter-term loan.
The average 15-year mortgage rate is 6.00% today. When deciding between a 15-year and a 30-year mortgage, consider your short-term versus long-term goals.
A 15-year mortgage comes with a lower interest rate than a 30-year term. This is great in the long run because you'll pay off your loan 15 years sooner, and that's 15 fewer years for interest to accumulate. But the trade-off is that your monthly payment will be higher as you pay off the same amount in half the time.
Let's say you get a $300,000 mortgage. With a 30-year term and a 6.73% rate, your monthly payment toward the principal and interest would be about $1,942, and you'd pay $399,051 in interest over the life of your loan — on top of that original $300,000.
If you get that same $300,000 mortgage with a 15-year term and a 6.00% rate, your monthly payment would jump to $2,532. But you'd only pay $155,683 in interest over the years.
With a fixed-rate mortgage, your rate is locked in for the entire life of your loan. You will get a new rate if you refinance your mortgage, though.
An adjustable-rate mortgage keeps your rate the same for a predetermined period of time. Then, the rate will go up or down depending on several factors, such as the economy and the maximum amount your rate can change according to your contract. For example, with a 7/1 ARM, your rate would be locked in for the first seven years, then change every year for the remaining 23 years of your term.
Adjustable rates typically start lower than fixed rates, but once the initial rate-lock period ends, it's possible your rate will go up. Lately, though, some fixed rates have been starting lower than adjustable rates. Talk to your lender about its rates before choosing one or the other.
Dig deeper: Fixed-rate vs. adjustable-rate mortgages
Mortgage lenders typically give the lowest mortgage rates to people with higher down payments, great or excellent credit scores, and low debt-to-income ratios. So, if you want a lower rate, try saving more, improving your credit score, or paying down some debt before you start shopping for homes.
Waiting for rates to drop probably isn't the best method to get the lowest mortgage rate right now. If you're ready to buy, focusing on your personal finances is probably the best way to lower your rate.
To find the best mortgage lender for your situation, apply for mortgage preapproval with three or four companies. Just be sure to apply to all of them within a short time frame — doing so will give you the most accurate comparisons and have less of an impact on your credit score.
When choosing a lender, don't just compare interest rates. Look at the mortgage annual percentage rate (APR) — this factors in the interest rate, any discount points, and fees. The APR, which is also expressed as a percentage, reflects the true annual cost of borrowing money. This is probably the most important number to look at when comparing mortgage lenders.
Learn more: Best mortgage lenders for first-time home buyers
According to Zillow, the national average 30-year mortgage rate is 6.73%, and the average 15-year mortgage rate is 6.00%. But these are national averages, so the average in your area could be different. Averages are typically higher in expensive parts of the U.S. and lower in less expensive areas.
The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate is 6.73% right now, according to Zillow. However, you might get an even better rate with an excellent credit score, sizable down payment, and low debt-to-income ratio (DTI).
Mortgage rates aren't expected to drop drastically in the near future, though they may inch down now and then.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
George Kittle Hopes Brock Purdy Will 'Buy Everything' After Extension
George Kittle Hopes Brock Purdy Will 'Buy Everything' After Extension originally appeared on Athlon Sports. The San Francisco 49ers recently signed star field general Brock Purdy to a five-year, $265 million contract extension, which has been a long time coming. Advertisement Now that he is getting paid a lot more, some of his teammates are hoping he can help finance some of the team's parties. In a recent appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, 49ers superstar tight end George Kittle said that he is expecting his quarterback to start pulling his weight more when it comes to paying for things. "He's buying everything from here on out," Kittle said. "Hopefully he pays for the Halloween party this year and it's not me and [Kyle Juszczyk] anymore. $265 [million] can put together a better one." Before his new contract, the 25-year-old QB was getting paid less than a million a year at just over $850,000. Now that he is getting paid $53 million a year, he will no longer have to live with a roommate like he has since 2023. He will also hopefully use this extension as motivation to help lead the Niners to a better year in 2025 than they had this past season. Advertisement San Francisco finished the 2024 season last in the NFC West with a 6-11 record, which means that they missed the playoffs for the first time since 2020. The team dealt with their fair share of injuries, so not all of that disappointment can be placed on Purdy's shoulders. But now that everyone is hopefully healthy, Purdy will be looking to go out there with his new massive contract and lead the team to a bounce back year in 2025. Related: 49ers' $120 Million Deal Ranks Among NFL's Worst Contracts Related: 49ers' Brock Purdy Has Huge MVP Opportunity in 2025 This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 15, 2025, where it first appeared.
Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Cosmetics giant Leonard Lauder dies at 92
Leonard Alan Lauder, who led the cosmetics company his parents founded and turned it into an international powerhouse, died June 14. Mr. Lauder was 92. He died surrounded by family, the Estée Lauder Companies said in a prepared statement Sunday. It did not say where Mr. Lauder had died. Mr. Lauder, a longtime Palm Beach resident, was the son of Estée and Joseph Lauder, who founded their company in 1946 in New York City. Their son Leonard was born there on March 19, 1933. He was a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Navy's Officer Candidate School. He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and a Navy reservist, and also studied at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. In 1958, Mr. Lauder joined the Estée Lauder Companies. He was its president from 1971 to 1995, and chief executive officer from 1982 to 1999, when he became chairman emeritus. The company said in its statement announcing Mr. Lauder's death that he helped 'helping transform the business from a handful of products sold under a single brand in U.S. stores to the multi-brand, global leader in prestige beauty that it is today.' Mr. Lauder led the launch of now-familiar cosmetic brands such as Aramis, Clinique, and Lab Series, and was involved in the acquisition of other brands including Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Jo Malone London, La Mer, and M∙A∙C. He was a noted philanthropist in art and medicine, pledging his 78-piece collection of Cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. He also established the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Museum. He was a trustee of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art from 1977 to 2011, and also its chairman emeritus. Mr. Lauder was honorary chairman of the board of directors at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, which his late wife Evelyn H. Lauder founded in 1993. He also co-founded and led the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation with his brother, Ronald S. Lauder, which supports cutting-edge drug research. Mr. Lauder was one of the wealthiest people in the world, with an estimated worth in the 2025 Forbes list of billionaires at $10.1 billion. Mr. Lauder was married to Evelyn Lauder from 1959 until her death in 2011. He married Judy Glickman Lauder in 2015. 'Throughout his life, my father worked tirelessly to build and transform the beauty industry, pioneering many of the innovations, trends, and best practices that are foundational to the industry today,' said his son William P. Lauder, chairman of the board of directors at The Estée Lauder Companies, in a prepared statement. 'He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer's and breast cancer. 'Above all, my father was a man who practiced kindness with everyone he met. His impact was enormous. He believed that employees were the heart and soul of our company, and they adored him and moments spent with him,' William Lauder said. In addition to his wife Judy and his son William, Mr. Lauder is survived by his son Gary M. Lauder and wife, Laura Lauder; five grandchildren, Rachel, Danielle, Djuna-Bear, Joshua, Eliana, two great-grandchildren, many stepchildren and step grandchildren, as well as his brother, Ronald S. Lauder, and wife, Jo Carole Lauder, and their daughters, Aerin Lauder and Jane Lauder. A private service will be held for friends and family. Memorial donations may be made to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation. The Lauder Companies invite condolences at This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Cosmetics giant Leonard Lauder dies at 92
Forbes
41 minutes ago
- Forbes
Friction Is The Point: What AI Will Never Understand About Being Human
The machine doesn't care what it's making—only that it's making it fast. Frictionless systems ... More optimize output. But meaning, memory, and margin live in the mess it leaves behind. The great smoothing is here. But what if friction isn't failure? What if it's the only thing left that still feels real? This piece continues my article 'Meta's Plans For AI Ads: How Automation Dismantles Culture,' where I explored how automation threatens creative labor. Now, I'm going deeper: not just into what we're losing, but what we must protect—friction, consent, and the human capacity for meaning. These aren't just headlines. They're coordinates on a map of erasure. This isn't a pivot. It's a continuation. Meta, Amazon, and Google have a long, calculated history of dismantling everything that came before them under the guise of reducing 'friction.' Meta siphoned audience from publishers, then crushed their business model. Google devoured classifieds and local journalism. Amazon disintermediated independent retailers and built a commerce monopoly masked as convenience. Each of these shifts promised efficiency and delivered consolidation. Now they're moving upstream. With AI as their engine, they're coming for the creative layer. And if we think their pursuit of frictionlessness won't extend into brand, storytelling, and identity, we've already lost the plot. This isn't theoretical. It's already happened. Each was presented as innovation. Each led to mass devaluation. Now those same companies are moving up the funnel—with AI as the scalpel—to extract the last remaining margin in human-led work: branding, storytelling, identity, and desire. If we pretend this pursuit of frictionlessness will stop short of the emotional, we haven't been paying attention. The result won't just be sameness. It'll be compression—of differentiation, of perceived value, of margin. And when there's no friction left to make someone stop and feel? There's no reason left to pay more. For anything. That's not just a creative loss. That's a threat to profitability. We've taught machines to move faster than us, smoother than us, and now speak for us. But the one thing we haven't taught them? How to care about what happens next. I've sat in rooms where the best ideas weren't obvious. They were uncomfortable. They got laughed at, challenged, rewritten. And those are the ones we still remember. We've been told that friction is inefficiency. That anything slow, messy, or nonlinear is wasteful. But friction isn't failure. It's architecture. It gives shape to ideas. It makes meaning take root. Remove the friction and you remove the form. What's left is output. Not authorship. Not intentionality. Not risk. Not anything that ever made a thing matter. Even video—the medium that once required light, timing, pacing, and emotion—is now generated by Amazon in under five minutes. With AI handling production, creation, and deployment, the very texture of storytelling is being erased. And when the message is frictionless, so is the memory. The human brain doesn't grow easily. It rewires itself through difficulty, uncertainty, and contradiction. Neuroscientists call it neuroplasticity—the process by which new neural pathways are formed when we encounter resistance and complexity. Think about learning to ride a bike. You didn't master balance through reading. You did it by wobbling. Falling. Adjusting. That struggle is what encoded the learning. In creative work, the same principle holds. A campaign brief that sparks debate, a draft that undergoes fundamental revision—these are signs that the brain is actively restructuring perception and sharpening understanding. No amount of generative content can do this for you. The brain doesn't just tolerate friction; it grows because of it. Psychologists, such as Robert Bjork, have demonstrated that introducing intentional obstacles to learning—what he refers to as "desirable difficulty"—enhances retention and depth of understanding. Try recalling a concept before you're shown the answer. It's harder. Slower. But you remember it longer. That's friction in action. In advertising, we've spent years sanding down every edge in the name of clarity. But clarity without tension isn't clarity. It's blandness. Great creativity requires effort. It catches you off guard. That friction forces engagement. And that engagement makes it stick. If it's too smooth, it slides right off. This is a form of attentional bias—a cognitive reality that explains why we create and activate narrative in the first place. When words are grouped in a way that's fresh, specific, and strategically intentional, they interrupt expectation. That's friction. It forces a pause, processing, and reflection. And in a sea of sameness, that pause is power. Narratives slow the brain just enough to invite meaning in. They cause us to contemplate, validate, and value. And in a race-to-the-bottom world, friction becomes the difference between something you scroll past and something you feel compelled to pay for. Strip away that language-level friction and you get optimization without identity—cheap content, cheaper attention, and eventually, commodities no one desires enough to buy at a margin. That's not just a creative crisis. It's a business model collapse in slow motion. This is echoed by the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian-American psychologist best known for introducing the concept of flow—the mental state of deep immersion in meaningful, challenging work. Csíkszentmihályi spent decades studying why some experiences make us feel alive, focused, and fulfilled. His research showed that the most rewarding activities are often preceded by resistance. Friction, in other words, is the entry fee to flow. It's not an obstacle to transcendence—it's the condition for it. The most powerful learning signal in your brain? When something violates your expectations. My friend calls this 'anticappointment,' a favorite neologism of his. Neuroscience refers to this prediction error as the moment your brain stops coasting and starts recalibrating. It's why punchlines land. Why plot twists thrill. Why disruptive creative works. When AI delivers content perfectly calibrated to what it knows we like, it flattens novelty, we get what we expect—and that's the problem. Nothing stretches. Nothing stirs. Friction is what creates those jolts of surprise. And surprise is what teaches. Without friction, the brain stays asleep. Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, coined the term hypernormalization. He describes a society where systems are so optimized and hollow that people continue to believe in them, even though they know they no longer hold meaning. Yurchak studied late-Soviet life, where official narratives felt eternal and artificial at once. Citizens went through the motions—work, slogans, routine—long after anyone believed the story. The result wasn't a revolution. It was a slow, soul-deep detachment from reality. Today's version? You scroll through infinite, polished content with the faint sense that none of it was made for you. Brand messages, influencer posts, AI-generated ads—all optimized to fit your feed, not your mind. It functions. But it doesn't stick. You know this feeling. It's nostalgia for something you didn't quite live. Familiarity with nothing specific. The eerie sense that even the intimate has become templated. That's the danger of a frictionless world: it erodes not just creativity, but belief, connection, and identity, not through rupture, but through rehearsal. We're not witnessing liberation. We're watching reality bleed out by degrees. Friction is what interrupts the loop. It's the glitch that reminds you something is off, and makes you care enough to ask why. Friction is the last honest metric. It's what reveals taste. It's what reveals care. It's the difference between something you scroll past and something that stops you. In a world where every brand has access to the same generative tools, the only real differentiator left is discernment, and discernment doesn't scale. It struggles. It questions. It hesitates before hitting publish. This is not about resisting AI. It's about resisting amnesia. It's about building systems—and stories—that let humans stay in the loop long enough to feel what they're making. Friction doesn't just slow us down. It reminds us we still have a choice. When content is optimized to our past behavior, when ads are generated before we know we need them, when every message is invisible in its targeting but intimate in its tone—are we still consenting to what we consume? Consent isn't a checkbox. It's the ability to pause, to question, to say yes with awareness—or no with clarity. But in a frictionless system, consent erodes, not by force, but by design. We don't opt in—we drift in. We don't choose—we scroll. We don't author—we adapt. Friction is what lets us feel that drift. It's the tug that says, this wasn't mine until I made it mine. Without it, influence becomes indistinguishable from control. This isn't just a philosophical distinction. It's an economic one. It's a forecast. Everything on the left can be automated. Everything on the right can't be faked. And that's the opportunity. If you're in marketing, brand, or creative work, this isn't the time to panic. It's time to get precise. Here's how to make yourself irreplaceable inside systems designed to erase you: These aren't productivity hacks. They're AI survival strategies for authorship in an age of automation.
