Concept Explanation · Savings Goals
ECB Key Interest Rate: A Live History
Live chart of the ECB Deposit Facility Rate since 2014, with every rate move and what it means for savings and mortgages in the euro area.
What this chart shows
The line above tracks the ECB's Deposit Facility Rate (DFR) — the rate
the European Central Bank pays commercial banks for parking reserves
overnight. Since 2024 the ECB has used the DFR as its single key policy
rate; before that it sat alongside the main refinancing rate and the
marginal lending facility. It is the rate that ultimately disciplines
what your bank charges on a mortgage and pays on a savings account.
Rates move in discrete steps — 25 or 50 basis points at a time — and
stay flat between Governing Council meetings. That's why the chart is
drawn as a step function rather than a smooth curve.
How to read the numbers
The four tiles up top show the current rate, the peak and trough across
the visible history, and the earliest value in our series. The "Recent
rate moves" table beneath the chart lists the last eight changes with
the size of each move in basis points (one basis point = 0.01 %).
The negative-rate years (2014–2022)
For eight years the DFR was negative — at one point as low as −0.50 %.
Commercial banks paid the ECB to hold their reserves, an unprecedented
experiment in monetary policy aimed at pushing money out of bank
balance sheets and into the real economy. Savers got nothing on most
EU current accounts and very little on time deposits.
The 2022–2023 hiking cycle
The ECB lifted the DFR from −0.50 % to 4.00 % in fourteen months —
ten consecutive hikes, the fastest tightening cycle in the bank's
history. The trigger was post-pandemic inflation peaking above 10 %
in the euro area. Mortgages tied to Euribor repriced almost overnight;
fixed-rate borrowers who locked in 2020–2021 sat on what amounted to
a very valuable contract.
The 2024–2026 cutting cycle
Once headline inflation fell back toward the 2 % target, the ECB began
cutting in 25 bp steps. The cuts are unwinding the 2022–2023 hikes,
but with a meaningful pause: the bank wants services inflation, not
just headline inflation, anchored before cutting further. Cuts may
stop above the pre-pandemic level if structural inflation drivers
(deglobalisation, energy transition, labour shortages) keep prices
stickier than they were in the 2010s.
What this means for your money
- Savings accounts finally pay meaningful interest in 2024–2026 —
but the spread between the best and worst providers widened. Some
big banks pass through 1 % of a 3 % DFR; smaller online banks pass
through more. Shop around: a 200 bp gap on a €20,000 emergency
fund is €400/year.
- Variable-rate mortgages track Euribor, which tracks DFR. If
your loan resets every 6 months, the recent cuts already showed up;
if your loan resets every 12 months, expect them at the next reset.
- Long-term fixed mortgages are pricier than they were in 2020,
but cheaper than at the 2023 peak. The spread between fixed and
variable is small enough in 2026 that the choice is mostly about
certainty preference, not headline cost.
- Bonds. A higher DFR floor means euro bond yields stay above
their 2010s norms. For someone building a long-dated bond ladder,
that is good news; for someone holding pre-2022 bonds, the price
hit from the hiking cycle is largely already taken.
Where this data comes from
The European Central Bank publishes the DFR via its Statistical Data
Warehouse (SDW). We pull the daily series under SDMX key
FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.DFR.LEV, refresh once a day, and surface a stale
flag if the call fails. The data goes back over a decade and updates
whenever the Governing Council changes rates — typically eight times
per year on scheduled meeting dates.