Mortgage Rates Hold Steady; Trump Portable Mortgage Draws Attention.
What happened to mortgage rates this week
The Freddie Mac 30-year fixed mortgage rate essentially held steady this week, averaging 6.24%, only slightly above last week’s 6.22% and well below the 6.78% a year ago. This near-flat movement reflects a broader market pause, as sentiment surrounding the government’s reopening is tempered by lingering fiscal and economic uncertainty. While the 10-year Treasury yield has shown signs of stabilizing, there is still no meaningful catalyst to push rates decisively higher or lower. The Federal Reserve’s repeated reminder that “policy is not on a preset course” is already well understood and priced in. With no official jobs report or key data releases during the shutdown, markets are operating in an information vacuum that reinforces this holding pattern.
What it means for the housing market
The housing market’s main challenge is now the lagged rebound following the government shutdown, creating continued friction in the immediate post-reopening period. The return to normal operations will be slow, as agencies critical to the mortgage process, such as the Federal Housing Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service, will be working through weeks of accumulated file backlogs, delaying transactions for days or weeks. For every day the government was shut down, there will likely be a comparable delay for an agency to clear its queue fully.
Beyond administrative delays, even with the government reopened, some households, particularly those affected by the shutdown, may take time to rebuild financial confidence before reentering the market.
Despite stable borrowing costs, the underlying theme of the housing market remains slowly improving inventory against a backdrop of subdued sales. Motivated buyers who have been waiting for a decisive drop may find that rates are stubbornly holding in this stable, albeit high, range. The current funding agreement, if passed, is best viewed as a timeout, not a solution, as the Continuing Resolution expires on Jan. 30, 2026, ensuring that fiscal uncertainty will resurface in the new year. The good news for veterans is that Veterans Affairs loans received