Central Bank Interest Rates by Country

What a central bank policy rate actually is

A central bank's policy rate is the benchmark interest rate it uses to steer the cost of money in its domestic economy. In most modern monetary systems it's the rate at which commercial banks can borrow from (or lend to) the central bank overnight — the Fed Funds target in the United States, the Deposit Facility Rate at the ECB, the Bank Rate at the Bank of England, the Selic rate at Banco Central do Brasil. That single number anchors every other interest rate in the system within days: mortgage rates, savings-account rates, credit-card APRs, corporate bond yields, the cost of government borrowing. When the policy rate moves, the rest of the yield curve recalibrates around it.

The reason there's so much drama around rate decisions is that a policy-rate change does three things at once. It changes the price of credit (so it discourages or encourages spending and investment). It changes the relative attractiveness of holding the currency (so it moves the foreign-exchange market). And it changes the discount rate used in every valuation model of every stock, bond and piece of real estate on Earth (so it moves asset prices broadly). A 25 basis-point move you'd otherwise think of as a rounding error has outsized consequences because it alters all three simultaneously.

The policy rate isn't always a single number. The Fed publishes a target range (currently 4.25–4.50%) and uses IORB, reverse repos and open-market operations to keep the effective Federal Funds rate inside the range. The ECB has three key rates — Main Refinancing Operations (MRO), Marginal Lending Facility and Deposit Facility — and since 2014 the Deposit Facility Rate has been the one that actually matters. The PBoC uses a mix of the 1-year Loan Prime Rate (LPR), the 7-day reverse repo rate and the Medium-term Lending Facility (MLF) rate; which is the "real" policy rate is a minor ongoing debate among China-watching economists. The table below quotes the figure most commonly cited in each jurisdiction.

Meeting frequency varies sharply. The FOMC sets rates roughly eight times a year, the ECB Governing Council six-weekly, the Bank of England eight times annually, the RBA ten times, the Bank of Japan eight. Emerging markets are sometimes less scheduled — Argentina's BCRA can move rates by decree outside any formal calendar, and Turkey's CBRT has repeatedly surprised with off-cycle actions. The next meeting column in the table is only authoritative for banks with published calendars; treat the rest as indicative.

How we source the data

Being honest about data provenance is the single most useful thing a reference page like this one can do. Every rate in the table above was transcribed by hand from the central bank's own decision page, linked in the "Source" column. The as of column is the date of the most recent decision at the linked source; the next meeting column is pulled from each bank's published calendar where one exists.

We don't fetch these rates programmatically — central banks publish policy rates in HTML pages whose structure varies by bank, and a scraper that breaks quietly when a site redesigns is worse than no scraper. The Bank of England, ECB and Federal Reserve do publish machine-readable feeds (the BoE has an Open Data portal, the ECB has SDMX Web Services, the Fed publishes H.15) and linking to those feeds directly is a better pattern than re-exposing them through UniRate. See the "Programmatic access" section below.

The Forex API does scrape FX reference rates from 15+ central banks (ECB, BoE, RBA, SNB, BoC, BCB, TCMB, BNR, CBE, QCB and others). Those are published as daily fixing rates and are more scrape-friendly. Policy rates are not FX rates — they're a different data type with different update cadence and different publication conventions. Conflating them is the most common mistake we see in central-bank-rate scrapers.

Refresh cadence on this page: quarterly, plus ad-hoc updates on any surprise decision. If you spot a rate here that disagrees with the source page, it's because a decision landed after our last refresh — please file an issue or email us and we'll update the same day. The source is authoritative; this page is a navigable index over the sources.

Common central-bank-rate gotchas

• The Fed Funds target range vs the effective rate. The FOMC sets a range (e.g. 4.25–4.50%). The Fed then uses open-market ops, the IORB and RRP rates to keep the effective Federal Funds rate — a weighted median of actual overnight trades — inside that range. When you see "Fed rate = 4.50%", it's the upper bound of the target. The effective rate is usually a few basis points lower.
• ECB MRO vs Deposit Facility. For a decade after 2008 the Deposit Facility Rate was below the MRO and almost every analyst still quoted the MRO. Since the ECB moved to a floor system in 2019, the Deposit Facility is the operative rate and the MRO is mostly ceremonial. Tutorials written before 2019 often quote the wrong rate; use the DFR.
• Turkey's CBRT has no fixed meeting calendar in practice. The Monetary Policy Committee publishes a calendar but has repeatedly acted outside it — notably in 2021–2023 when political intervention drove off-cycle cuts and reversals. Treat the "next meeting" for TRY as a weak signal.
• The PBoC has three overlapping rates. Economists argue about which is the "real" policy rate: the 1-year LPR (published monthly), the 7-day reverse repo (adjusted ad hoc), or the MLF rate. We quote the 1-year LPR because it's the one most consumer and corporate loan contracts actually reference, but for wholesale-market analysis the 7-day reverse repo moves faster.
• Some emerging-market rates are policy, not market. Argentina's 29% rate is the BCRA monetary-policy rate; the street rate on ARS deposits is different, and the blue-chip swap implied rate different again. Don't take an EM policy rate as a trading rate.
• Rate changes don't always hit currency markets immediately. Surprise moves (non-consensus) do; expected moves are priced in. If you're building an FX trading signal, the surprise relative to consensus is what matters, not the raw rate change — and that's not in this table.