Yield Curve Viewer — Through
Treasury curve from the Daily Par Yield Curve Rates, U.S. Department of the Treasury
Most local governments look at the yield curve exactly twice: the week they price a bond issue, and the week someone on the council asks why the number moved. In between, the curve is doing the work that sets the community's cost of capital — and it rarely moves in parallel. Short rates and long rates routinely travel in opposite directions in the same week. A finance officer tracking only “the 10-year” can miss a double-digit swing at the maturity that actually drives their structure.
This viewer was built to put that motion in front of the people who have to live with it: city and county finance directors, school business officials, utility and authority boards, municipal advisors, and the elected officials who approve the debt.
How a municipal user should work through it
- Read the tenor that matches your structure, not the headline. A 20-year level-debt GO is not priced off the 10-year. Use the labels at 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 years — and remember the 15- and 25-year dots are hollow because they are interpolated, not published.
- Switch the Curve selector to AAA Municipal. That is the closest figure here to your own tax-exempt cost of funds before credit spread, insurance, and issuance costs.
- Use the history envelope for the long view. The red dashed line is the highest this curve has been at each maturity over the selected lookback; the green dashed line is the lowest; the shaded band between is the middle half of all sessions. It answers the question a council actually asks — is this a good time or a bad time? — with ten years of Treasury's own daily data rather than an impression. Default is five years; ten is one click away.
- Turn on the 30-day average to see whether a move is real. The dashed gray line on the main chart is the average curve over the last 30 sessions, and the shaded band around it is one standard deviation. When today's curve sits inside the band, the market is drifting. When it pushes outside, something happened. The variance table under the gauge puts a number on it: deviation in basis points and a z-score for each tenor, so “rates moved a lot this week” becomes a measurable claim rather than an impression.
- Stop anywhere and read the point-in-time review. Drag the slider to any session and the dotted marker on the timeline plus the review panel below it rebuild for that date — where the curve stood, how far it was from its own average, what an issuer pricing that day would have paid, and, on historical dates, what happened over the following twenty sessions. It is the fastest way to answer “what would this have cost us in October?” and to show a board how a past decision aged.
- Check the regime gauge before you read anything else. The level of rates tells you what money costs; the shape tells you what it costs to borrow longer, and that is the part that changes how you structure an issue. The gauge reads the 2-year to 30-year spread and the panel rewrites its structuring advice to match — the guidance under a flat curve is close to the opposite of the guidance under a steep one. It also flags days when the market moved far enough that a number you were quoted last week is stale.
- Watch the debt service tiles, not just the yields. The last two KPI boxes translate whatever curve you are viewing into annual level debt service per $1 million and the dollar change in that figure since January. Set the term with the Debt service term selector. Basis points are an abstraction to most councils; dollars per million are not, and the number scales linearly — multiply by your par amount in millions and you have your answer.
- Go straight to the TIC panel for the number your board will repeat. Nobody in a council meeting quotes the 17-year point on the AAA scale. They quote the true interest cost and the average maturity, and this panel estimates both for 10-, 15-, 20-, 25- and 30-year level-debt structures off whatever date is on the slider. Set your own credit spread and underwriter's discount, enter your par amount, and you have a defensible planning figure and an annual debt service number for the budget in the same view. Because it follows the timeline, you can also answer “what would this have cost in March?” without rebuilding a model.
- Use taxable-equivalent yield when you are comparing financing options. Weighing a tax-exempt issue against a bank placement, a taxable refunding, a USDA loan, or an SRF draw? TEY is the honest apples-to-apples number. Set the tax-rate selector to the bracket of the buyer you are actually competing for.
- Scrub the timeline before you present. Dragging from January to today shows a council exactly what changed and when. That is far more persuasive than one number in a staff report.
- Push the spread-shock slider. The muni and corporate curves are modeled. Stressing them ±25 or ±50 basis points turns a single estimate into a defensible range — which is what a board should be shown.
- Watch the 2s30s spread tile. It tells you what you are paying for maturity. When that spread narrows, extending an issue's final maturity costs less in additional yield than it did when the curve was steeper.
Why the window is a rolling twelve months
Everything here runs on the last 252 trading sessions rather than the calendar year. A January 1 reset is an accident of the calendar: it throws away context every twelve months, and it does not match the fiscal year most local governments actually budget on. A rolling year also gives the trailing-60-session cost flag and the 30-session moving average real history on day one instead of making them wait a quarter to become meaningful. The weekly table still shows a calendar year-to-date column, because that is the number that goes in a budget document — but the flags, the ranges, and the percentiles all read from the full twelve months.
The difference is not cosmetic. Measured from January 2 the 30-year is up 57 basis points; measured across the full rolling year it is up 79, and it is up 89 basis points from the October 22 low. Only the last of those three tells an issuer what the swing was actually worth.
Reading the shape: five regimes, five different conversations
The same 5.09% ten-year yield means very different things depending on what the rest of the curve is doing. This is the logic the gauge applies, and the on-screen narrative changes automatically as the reading moves between bands:
| Regime | 2s30s | What it means for an issuer | Structural tilt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inverted | below 0 bp | Long money is cheaper than short. Interim financing loses its rationale; arbitrage rebate becomes a live exposure; revenue forecasts deserve a second look. | Term out, lock long |
| Flat | 0 – 50 bp | Almost no penalty for length. Extension is nearly free, and the savings case for a BAN strategy largely disappears. Flat curves rarely persist. | Lock long while it lasts |
| Normal | 50 – 150 bp | Conventional trade-off. Match amortization to useful life and let policy, not the market, drive the structure. | Standard analysis |
| Steep | 150 – 250 bp | Real premium for every added year. Interim financing looks cheap by comparison — but rolling short carries refinancing risk. | Question the long final |
| Very steep | above 250 bp | Unusual premium for length. Phased issuance and shorter finals merit serious study, though steepness usually signals the cheap front end will not stay cheap. | Shorten or phase |
Use the Reading selector on the gauge to preview any of these before you need them. It is a useful way to show a board what your advice would be under a different market without waiting for the market to get there. Previews are labeled hypothetical on screen and in the panel.
Ten years of context, and what it says about today
The envelope draws on 2,119 trading sessions of Treasury's own published par yield curve, August 2016 through today. It is the longest view in this tool, and it reframes everything above it.
The rest of the curve tells a more graduated story, and the gradient is the point:
| Tenor | Today | 10-yr low | 10-yr high | Percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2-Year | 4.74% | 0.09% Feb 5 2021 | 5.19% Oct 17 2023 | 94th |
| 5-Year | 4.89% | 0.19% Aug 4 2020 | 5.09% Sep 30 2026 | >99th |
| 10-Year | 5.09% | 0.52% Aug 4 2020 | 5.31% Oct 5 2026 | >99th |
| 20-Year | 5.47% | 0.87% Mar 9 2020 | 5.71% Oct 7 2026 | >99th |
| 30-Year | 5.43% | 0.99% Mar 9 2020 | 5.67% Oct 7 2026 | >99th |
Read down the percentile column: everything from five years out is still above the 99th percentile of the decade, but now 20 to 24 basis points off its record, and the front end sits at the 94th. The 10-year has closed higher on 16 sessions in ten years, all since September 23; the 20- and 30-year on 15 and 14, all since September 24. The 2-year is 45 basis points under its October 2023 peak of 5.19%, and the 3-year, at 4.82%, is 21 under its own. The level is still historically high; what has changed in two weeks is the direction.
Three cautions before this goes in front of a board. The low lines are set by March and August of 2020 — a 0.99% thirty-year is not a benchmark any issuer will price against again, and showing it can make every other rate look unreasonable. Treasury changed its curve-fitting method in December 2021, so the left half of a ten-year envelope was constructed differently from the right. And the envelope has a coverage gap from 2024 through mid-2025. Treasury's published closes in that stretch topped out below today's levels from five years out (the 30-year peaked near 5.08% in May 2025), so the record calls stand. The 2-year's 94th percentile would read somewhat lower with 2024 included, though: it closed near 4.97% in April of that year. All three facts are disclosed on the chart itself. The five-year window, which is the default, avoids the worst of the first problem while still covering the full hiking cycle.
Two lamps, because level and shape are different questions
A fair challenge to the regime gauge: across all 252 sessions in this window — a full rolling year — it has read Normal, green, every single day. The 2s30s spread ranged between 140 basis points last December and 53 on September 21. It never came near the steep band, and its one approach to the flat band, in late September, reversed within days. A gauge that almost never changes color has to justify its place on the page.
That is the honest limitation of a shape-only indicator, and it is why a second lamp sits beside it. The cost pressure flag ignores shape entirely and asks a different question: where does annual debt service per $1 million sit inside its own trailing 60-session range? On a 20-year tax-exempt structure, the trailing twelve months break down as 179 elevated sessions, 34 moderate, and 19 favorable, plus the first 20 held back as a baseline while the range fills in — a signal that actually moves, and one that tracks the year issuers actually lived through:
| Window | Flag | Sessions | What was happening |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 15 – Nov 12, 2025 | Baseline | 20 | Held back while the range fills in — but it holds the cheapest session of the whole window. Debt service bottomed at $67,147 per $1M on October 22 as the 30-year Treasury hit 4.54%. |
| Dec 4, 2025 – Feb 9, 2026 | Elevated | 45 | A long elevated run. Rates repriced through the turn of the year. |
| Feb 12 – Mar 3, 2026 | Favorable | 13 | The last real window. Debt service fell back to $67,206 on February 27 before turning. |
| Mar 11 – Apr 13, 2026 | Elevated | 24 | The turn higher, and it did not give much back. |
| Apr 21 – May 27, 2026 | Elevated | 26 | Debt service crossed $69,000 and stayed there. |
| Jul 7 – Oct 15, 2026 | Elevated | 71 | The longest run in the window by 26 sessions. It set thirteen new twelve-month highs after September 1, the last $72,884 per $1M on October 5. |
| Oct 16, 2026 – present | Moderate | 1 | The run is over. Friday's $71,864 sits at the 65th percentile of the last 60 sessions, $1,020 under the October 5 high — the first non-elevated reading since July 6. |
Read together the two lamps say something neither says alone: the shape of the curve gave almost no signal all year, while the cost of borrowing spent most of the year near the top of its own range. An issuer who looked only at a green shape gauge and concluded nothing was happening would have missed a move from $67,147 to $71,864 per $1 million of annual debt service — $4,717 a year on every million borrowed, between the cheapest session of the window and today. The cost lamp turning from red to amber on Friday is a statement that the last two weeks have pulled debt service back toward the middle of its recent range, not a forecast that it will keep falling. The first twenty sessions of any year show as a gray Baseline rather than a color, because a percentile drawn from ten days of history is noise dressed up as a signal.
Questions this is built to answer
- If we had priced in March instead of today, what would it have cost us?
- Is the recent move a front-end story or a long-end story — and does it even touch our structure?
- What is our tax exemption worth right now, stated in taxable terms?
- Is the curve shape currently arguing for or against the structure we already planned?
- What TIC should we plan around for a 20-year level-debt issue, and what does that do to the levy?
- What is the yield give-up if we term out to 30 years instead of 20?
- How much of the change since budget adoption is the market, and how much is us?
The four-session week (the bond market was closed Monday for Columbus Day) brought the largest weekly decline in long rates since the September run-up began, and the curve flattened as it fell. Against last Friday's close, the 1-year is down 1 basis point, the 2-year 6 and the 3-year 7, while the 5-year is down 13, the 7- and 10-year 15 each, the 20-year 18 and the 30-year 17. Rates falling, the long end fastest: a bull flattener.
Tuesday and Wednesday the long end slipped 4 to 5 basis points a day while the front end held or rose. Thursday did the heavy lifting: everything from five years out fell 9 basis points, the 10-year's largest one-day decline since June and matching the 30-year's largest since August 19. Friday added small declines at the front, with the 30-year unchanged at 5.43%. The 10-year closed the week at 5.09%, its lowest close since September 22.
The 2s30s spread finished at 69 basis points, down 11 on the week after touching 66 on Thursday, the narrowest since September 28. The 2s10s spread is 35.
Statistically, the curve is sitting almost exactly on its 30-session average. Every tenor reads Within range, and none is more than 2 basis points from its mean (z-scores between −0.14 and +0.13). The run-up and this retreat have now roughly offset inside the 30-session window.
What it means for structure
This week cut both the cost of borrowing and the cost of borrowing longer. At 69 basis points from two years to thirty, the give-up for extending a final maturity is 11 narrower than last Friday — 16 above the September 21 low and 70 below January — so a short-versus-long comparison leans further toward the longer final than it did a week ago. On level, 10- to 30-year structures are 9 to 13 basis points cheaper than last Friday, the longer ones gaining the most. Short-term borrowing eased too: the 1- to 3-year sector that BANs, commercial paper and bank lines price off is 13 to 19 basis points under its September 28 highs, though still 30 to 37 above September 2 and 43 to 51 above August 21. The 2- to 5-year sector is 115 to 127 basis points above its January 2 close.
What it means on the tax-exempt side
Where the shape sits
Worth holding those two facts together: the shape of the curve is inside the normal band while the level of the long end, even after this week, is still above anything before September. That combination is what the two lamps and the envelope are built to keep separate.
The regime gauge reads Normal at 69 basis points, and it has read Normal on every one of the 252 sessions in this rolling year. The 2s30s spread has ranged between 140 bp last December and 53 bp on September 21, never approaching the steep band. For most of the year the curve's shape did not argue for or against any particular structure, and almost all the pressure on issuers came from the level of rates.
The direction of travel is toward flatter. The spread compressed 86 basis points from January to its September 21 low, widened 37 by October 7, and has since given back 21 of that. At 69 it sits 19 above the flat band and 81 below the steep one.
What it did to true interest cost
At the panel's default assumptions — AAA municipal scale plus a 15 basis point credit spread, 0.80% underwriter's discount — Friday's curve produces an estimated TIC of 3.58% on a 10-year level-debt structure, 3.98% on a 20-year, and 4.33% on a 30-year, with average lives of 5.8, 11.7 and 18.4 years respectively.
The week took 9 basis points off a 10-year structure, 12 off a 20-year and 13 off a 30-year — the largest weekly decline since the run-up began, and the flattening shows in the gradient. On the year, TIC is up 52 to 68 basis points since January 2 and 68 to 76 over twelve months, and shorter structures have absorbed more of the increase: a 10-year issue costs 68 basis points more in TIC than it did in January, a 30-year issue 52.
Scale check
Run through the full structure rather than a single point on the scale, a $10 million, 20-year level-debt issue carries estimated annual debt service of $728,412 today, $10,269 under the October 5 twelve-month high of $738,681. Last Friday the same structure was $735,965; twelve months ago it was $684,596; on January 2 it was $691,908; and at the October 22 low it was $680,906. Against that cheapest session the same $10 million of projects now costs $47,506 more a year, or roughly $950,000 over the life of the issue. This week saved $7,553 a year. The number worth putting in front of a council is not a basis-point figure; it is forty-seven thousand dollars a year of levy or rate capacity — down from fifty-seven thousand at the peak.
For comparison, the same 20-year structure done on a taxable basis prices at an estimated 5.52% TIC — 155 basis points higher, or about $103,300 more per year in debt service. That is the concrete cost of losing tax exemption on a project, and it is a useful figure to have ready when a private-use or advance-refunding question comes up.
Because the municipal ladder in this viewer is held constant, these figures move only with Treasuries; actual AAA scales and credit spreads moved on their own during 2026. Treat them as order of magnitude, not as a quote.
What to watch next
- Whether the retreat continues. The long end is 22 to 24 basis points off its records in six sessions. Friday's quieter close (the 30-year unchanged) is the first sign it may be slowing.
- The cost pressure lamp. It turned from Elevated to Moderate on Friday for the first time since July. Another week like this one would push it toward Favorable; a rebound would turn it red again.
- The flattening alert. On Monday the five-session comparison moves to October 9, when the spread was 80. At 69 that reads −11, so the alert clears unless the curve flattens another 4 basis points or more.
- Short-term borrowing costs specifically. The 1- to 3-year sector is 13 to 19 basis points off its highs, a real break for BAN rollovers, commercial paper and bank lines, but still 30 to 37 above September 2.
ⓘ Sources, calibration, and what is modeled vs. observed — click to open
First, the ladder does not move. It is calibrated to mid-August 2026 and held constant across all 252 days. So when you scrub back to last fall, you are seeing last fall's Treasuries times August ratios — not the muni market as it actually traded then. Credit spreads and muni ratios moved over the past year, and this viewer does not capture that movement. The day-to-day motion you see on these curves is entirely Treasury motion.
Second, the shapes differ by construction. The AAA municipal benchmark past eleven years is a yield-to-worst on a 5% coupon callable to a ten-year par call, not a bullet yield. Corporate spreads here are option-adjusted index levels applied as par spreads. Neither is strictly comparable to a Treasury par yield. For directional work and for showing a council or a board what tax exemption is worth, this is fine. For pricing an actual issue, use your financial advisor's live scale.
Use the spread shock slider to stress the ladder. That is the honest way to work with a modeled curve: not as a single answer, but as a range you can push on.
Corporate spreads are added in basis points over Treasury and widen with maturity, which is what credit curves do: AA runs 22 bp at one year to 68 bp at thirty, A runs 35 bp to 92 bp, BBB runs 55 bp to 135 bp. These are anchored to the ICE BofA index option-adjusted spreads for August 2026, where BBB was reported near 97 bp, and cross-checked against Treasury's own High Quality Market corporate curve, which showed roughly 70 bp over Treasuries at ten years and 83 bp at thirty.
On the taxable-equivalent line. TEY divides the tax-exempt yield by one minus your rate. At 40.8% the math is unforgiving in the right direction: a 4.41% thirty-year AAA municipal is worth 7.45% to a taxable investor. That gap is the whole argument for the exemption, and it is why the compare view is the one to show a council.
On the thirty points. Treasury publishes only eight tenors — 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 20, and 30 years. Those are the solid dots. Everything between is interpolated with a monotone cubic fit. The 15-year and 25-year marks show as hollow dots for that reason, and the stretch between 20 and 30 is the least observed part of the curve.