When you check financial news or look into broad borrowing costs, you will often run across mentions of Federal Reserve rate tables. The most common daily record is the H.15 release, officially titled Selected Interest Rates. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System publishes this report every business day except federal holidays, compiling benchmark rates across short-term lending facilities, commercial paper, and government debt securities.
The H.15 release functions as an operational snapshot of money-market and government borrowing benchmarks, not a catalog of consumer deposit yields.
What the H.15 table is
The H.15 Selected Interest Rates release is an official statistical summary compiled by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Published on each business day, it collects daily rate determinations across select U.S. government obligations and central bank credit operations. The release serves institutional desks, economists, and analysts who track standard base rates across the broader economy.
Because the release represents a specific snapshot for a given trading day, a printed or cached copy can quickly fall behind current trading conditions. The Federal Reserve archive hosted on ALFRED documents release schedules extending back across decades of business days. If you review a table online or in a research brief, check the release date at the top of the document. Confirm that you are looking at the newest available publication before recording any yields.
How to read a single row
Reading the raw data requires looking at three distinct columns together: the series identifier, the observation date, and the published rate. In the official data files published via the H.15 XML feed, each record locks a rate value to a single calendar day. Missing any one of those three components makes the row useless, because benchmark rates fluctuate from day to day.
The table combines very different credit instruments into a single presentation. For example, records show the federal funds rate alongside short-term Treasury bills, central bank discount window credit, and commercial paper. In a sample report from November 2, 2026, the federal funds rate stood at 3.88 percent, the Federal Reserve discount rate stood at 4.00 percent, and the 3-month Treasury bill rate stood at 4.03 percent. Each metric measures a different segment of the financial system:
- Federal funds: The rate commercial banks charge one another for overnight unsecured loans to meet balance requirements.
- Discount rate: The lending rate charged to eligible institutions borrowing directly from a Federal Reserve Bank lending facility.
- Treasury bills: Short-term debt obligations issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury at a discount to face value.
- Commercial paper: Short-term, unsecured promissory notes issued by private companies, such as 1-month nonfinancial commercial paper.
Because these series reflect completely separate borrowing terms and credit structures, you cannot directly swap or compare them without accounting for their underlying mechanics.
What ND and NA mean
When reviewing the H.15 table, you will occasionally see letters instead of numbers. The most common indicators are ND and NA. On November 2, 2026, for instance, the bank prime loan rate was reported in the daily data feed as ND, while 3-month nonfinancial commercial paper appeared as NA.
The official publishing desk does not provide extended definitions for these letter codes directly within the data table cells. In practice, both codes inform the reader that no valid, reportable rate was compiled for that specific series on that date. This can happen due to a lack of eligible trading volume, an incomplete survey response, or a reporting pause from private quote contributors.
The critical rule for a saver reading these tables is never to count an ND or an NA as zero. A blank or letter-coded cell simply marks missing information. Calculating an average or tracking a trend requires skipping the missing observation or checking adjacent trading days where valid market data was recorded.
What the table does not show a saver
Many savers look up the H.15 release hoping to see what they will earn on an emergency fund or a certificate of deposit. The H.15 table does not report consumer deposit products. It contains no rows for retail savings accounts, consumer money market accounts, checking accounts, or certificates of deposit offered by retail financial institutions.
Federal Reserve releases compile broad market benchmarks, but they do not establish mandatory rates for retail deposits. Individual banks and credit unions establish their own deposit yields based on internal funding demands, asset yields, and local competition. The federal documents do not explain the exact margins a bank uses, nor do they cover the federal rules governing deposit interest compounding, account fee schedules, or tax obligations on earned interest. To verify what an account actually pays, you must look directly at that bank's truth-in-savings disclosures.
Downloading the data yourself
If you prefer to examine historical interest rate movements directly rather than viewing a single day's static page, the Federal Reserve provides an interactive tool called the Data Download Program. This program allows you to assemble, customize, and export records for your own records.
The download workflow follows a three-step structure on the central bank website:
- Choose: You start on the H.15 Choose page to select the Selected Interest Rates release from the statistical catalog.
- Build: Next, you proceed to the H.15 Build page, where you check off only the specific series you want, such as short-term Treasury rates or the bank prime rate.
- Review: Finally, the H.15 Review page lets you choose your output format, such as a CSV spreadsheet, and set your date limits.
Restricting your export keeps the resulting file small and easy to navigate. For example, using the system to export the last 12 observations provides a compact, twelve-business-day record of how a given benchmark moved, avoiding massive files filled with decades of historical lines.
Questions to ask when you read a rate
Whenever you examine a rate published in the H.15 dataset, running through a brief checklist helps prevent common misinterpretations:
- Which exact date does this figure represent? Markets fluctuate daily, so confirm that the release date corresponds to the trading session you want to review.
- Has the release been updated? Because the central bank updates figures on business afternoons, an early morning check may reflect activity from two business days prior.
- Which borrowing sector does the label describe? A Treasury rate reflects sovereign borrowing costs, while commercial paper reflects corporate borrowing, and federal funds reflect interbank lending.
If you encounter an anomaly or need technical clarification regarding a published series code, the data team listed on the government data catalog maintains an inquiry address at [email protected]. Checking primary agency sources directly ensures you base your knowledge on official data rather than third-party assumptions.
Please seek a professional. This article is general information, not financial, tax or insurance advice. Please seek a licensed financial, tax or insurance professional about your own situation.
