Three yields, three different stories
The US Treasury yield curve is the price of money across time, set every trading day in the deepest and most liquid bond market in the world. Each maturity tells a different story. The 2-year is the market's real-time vote on where the federal funds rate will be over the next two years — when traders expect cuts, the 2-year drops; when they expect hikes, it rises. The 10-year embeds longer-term inflation expectations and the term premium investors demand for tying up capital. The 30-year is dominated by pension funds, insurers, and central banks matching long-duration liabilities — it's the slowest-moving and the most macro of the three.
All three are constant-maturityyields. The US Treasury interpolates from the actively traded universe of Treasury notes and bonds so a quoted 10-year always refers to a hypothetical bond with exactly 10 years to maturity. That's the only way to build a clean apples-to-apples time series across decades of issuance. The raw data publishes daily at the New York close on the Treasury's interest-rate statistics page and lands on FRED within hours.
How the 10-year connects to your mortgage
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate tracks the 10-year Treasury, not the federal funds rate. The reason is prepayment risk: the average US mortgage refinances or sells in roughly 7–10 years, so the 10-year Treasury is the closest-matching risk-free benchmark. Lenders take the 10-year yield, add a spread (historically ~1.7 pp, today closer to 2.5 pp), and that's your mortgage rate. When the 10-year moves 50 basis points, the average 30-year mortgage rate moves about the same within a week — see our mortgage payment calculator to translate basis points into monthly dollars.
Reading the yield curve in real time
The shape of the curve — whether long yields exceed short yields, and by how much — is one of the most reliable macroeconomic indicators in the data. An upward-sloping curve (10Y higher than 2Y by 100+ bps) is the historical norm and signals healthy growth expectations. A flat curve (within 25 bps) is a late-cycle warning. An inverted curve, where the 2-year yields more than the 10-year, has preceded every US recession since 1955. The lead time is highly variable — 6 months to over 2 years — which makes inversion a powerful but slow signal.
See our dedicated 2s10s yield-curve tracker for the spread series, recent inversion dates, and recession-signal history. For where Treasury yields fit in the broader rate picture see the live rates dashboard and the fed funds cycle page.
Caveats
Constant-maturity series are interpolated. On days when there is no on-the-run issue at a given exact maturity, the Treasury fits a curve through nearby points. The resulting yield is a model output, not a traded price. For institutional purposes, traders watch on-the-run yields (the most recently issued bond at each maturity) rather than constant-maturity. For retail purposes — what your 30-year mortgage will cost — constant-maturity is the right number. None of this is investment advice.