About Bankrate

The financial industry isn’t built for you. Bankrate is.

Banks have rates to protect. Lenders have margins to defend. The whole system is designed around their convenience, not your outcome. We’re not a bank or a lender — so we can show you what they won’t: the most competitive rate available to you, from lenders who have to earn it.

Mortgages
Banking
Credit cards
Loans

One standard, across every financial decision.

Whether you’re looking for a mortgage, a better savings rate, or a new credit card — the same principle applies. We track over 850 banks and credit unions, publish what we find, and keep our editorial content independent from our commercial relationships. Institutions earn their place by rate, not by what they pay us.

Lender competition exists because you do.

100 million people use Bankrate every year. That’s why hundreds of lenders compete openly here — because every borrower could choose any of them. Bankrate isn’t a bank, doesn’t lend money, and doesn’t earn more if you pick one lender over another. That independence is what keeps the competition real.

The lender who wins your loan wins it on price — not because they paid us more to be at the top of the list. In 2025, that process produced a rate that beat 99.7% of offers from 850+ surveyed banks and credit unions. Not a marketing claim. A documented outcome.

How we’re paid

Independence and integrity since 1982

Bankrate was founded with a journalist’s instinct: people deserved to know what banks were actually charging — and that information was being kept from them.

Robert K. Heady founded the Bank Rate Monitor to put verified rate data in plain English, for anyone who wanted it. The data was trusted because it was independent. Nearly 50 years later, it still is.

Read our founder’s story

We don’t just track the market. We hold it accountable.

In 2026, Bankrate published a study of 2.8 million mortgage originations — the largest independent analysis of mortgage overpayment ever conducted. The findings were specific, documented, and uncomfortable for the industry.

The borrowers most likely to overpay weren’t the financially vulnerable. They were upper-income households with strong credit, operating through referral networks that had no incentive to find them a better rate. Better credit made the problem worse, not better.

We published it because that’s what an independent financial institution does. The research is free to read.

Read The Hidden Homeownership Tax

850+
Banks and credit unions surveyed every week
$65billionB
Drained from American homeowners annually by above-market mortgage pricing
100million+M+
People who use Bankrate every year
40+years
Tracking rates independently
2.8millionM
Mortgage originations analyzed in our 2026 research
99.7%
Of banks beaten by Bankrate’s top offers in 2025

Behind the numbers

Our Mission

We connect people to trusted ways to save, borrow, and thrive.

American homeowners lose $70 billion every year to above-market mortgage pricing — not because they aren’t paying attention, but because the system isn’t built to give them a fair shot. The better rate exists for virtually every borrower profile. It just requires a place where lenders have to offer it.