‘Until inflation peaks, mortgage rates won’t either.’ We asked 3 economists and real estate pros: Will mortgage rates climb higher this summer?

In June, rates on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage climbed above 6%, according to Bankrate data. This comes as inflation stubbornly sits at a 40-year high and the Fed has raised rates multiple times in an attempt to curb it. So aspiring home buyers likely want to know: Will mortgage rates keep climbing up this summer? (You can see the lowest mortgage rates you might qualify for here.)

Nadia Evangelou, senior economist and director of forecasting at the National Association of Realtors (NAR), says although mortgage rates will continue to rise in the following months, she doesn’t expect to see the same sharp increases that the market experienced in March and April. “It seems that mortgage rates have already priced in the Fed’s tightening policy and persistent inflation.”

She notes that when the Federal Reserve raised its short-term interest rates in March, “mortgage rates surged about 80 basis points in the next three consecutive weeks.”  But she says, that major uptick didn’t happen again in May: “The effect of the Fed’s rate hike on mortgage rates was smaller in May than in March,” says Evangelou.

For his part, Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate, says what happens next depends a lot on inflation: “Until inflation peaks, mortgage rates won’t either. Without improvement on the inflation front, we don’t know where the interest rate ceiling will be,” says McBride. 

Realtor.com chief economist Danielle Hale Danielle Hale agrees that inflation will play a role in mortgage rates, and says mortgage rates will likely climb a bit but that the steep climb we saw in early 2022 probably isn’t going to be as steep this time.

“Despite the uptick in overall inflation that we saw in May, core inflation actually subsided somewhat,” says Hale. That’s important because: “Core inflation is the figure that’s more likely to sway policymakers’ thinking because it’s thought to be more representative of the type of inflation pressures that the Fed can impact,” says Hale.