As the midterm elections draw closer, President Donald Trump’s pledge to lower mortgage rates and improve housing affordability is facing a harsh reality check: borrowing costs are now roughly where they stood when he took office nearly two years ago. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised voters he would lower rates dramatically if elected, going as far as telling supporters in Arizona that he could bring them back to levels last seen during the pandemic-era housing boom. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.09 percent the week when he made that pledge, according to Freddie Mac — lower than it is today.
Newsweek contacted the White House for comment by email on Tuesday. During the week ending January 23, 2025, the same week Trump made his return to the White House, the national 30-year fixed-rate mortgage—the most popular home loan among American borrowers—averaged 6.96 percent, according to Freddie Mac’s data. This was below the peak of 7.79 percent reached in October 2023, the highest level reached after the Federal Reserve launched its aggressive rate-hiking campaign to slow the rise of inflation, but still roughly double the pandemic lows of 2 percent and 3 percent.
In early January 2021, just before Joe Biden entered the White House, mortgage rates reached a weekly all-time low of 2.65 percent. Between Trump’s inauguration and late February this year, when the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran, mortgage rates were slowly falling down, despite occasional setbacks. As of the week ending February 26, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage averaged 5.98 percent, having fallen below the 6 percent mark for the first time since early September 2022, based on Freddie Mac’s data.
Over the course of 2025, the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate three times (though likely not as much as the president would have liked it to), leading to the steady decline of mortgage rates until late February. According to Freddie Mac, the average for a benchmark 30-year fixed home loan rose to 6.71 percent for the week ending September 3—the highest level since July 2025. The increase reverses projections from late 2025, when analysts anticipated that rates would moderate to or below 6 percent by the end of this year.
The root cause for this reversal can be traced back to the ongoing war with Iran, a conflict that has also brought up gas prices in the U.S. and has been linked to Trump’s plunging approval rating. Buying a home in the U.S. at the current rate of 6.71 percent and the July median sale price of $407,730, according to Redfin, costs roughly $800 more per month than it did a few years ago, when borrowing costs were historically low, assuming a 20 percent deposit. Unlike tax rates or tariffs, the president has no direct authority over the interest rate lenders charge homebuyers, which means that Trump could have never lowered mortgage rates single-handedly.
This is why he grew increasingly frustrated with former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who refused to cave in to the president’s calls for aggressive rate cuts last year, arguing that rate decisions should be driven by inflation and economic data rather than presidential demands. Mortgage rates are largely determined by financial markets, particularly the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note, inflation expectations and investor confidence in the broader economy.
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