Thirty-eight hundredths of one percent. On a $10,000 balance left alone for a full year, that comes to $38 in interest, or a little over three dollars a month. That is not a figure from a rate-comparison site or a single unlucky bank. It is the national average paid on savings accounts by every insured bank and credit union the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation can collect data on, as of July 20, 2026.
The number matters because most households never check it. A savings balance is the money people are most confident about. It is insured, it is liquid, and it sits in the account where the paycheck already lands. What almost nobody does is compare what the account pays against what the government’s own table says the same product pays elsewhere, and against the short-term interest rate the FDIC prints one column over.
What 0.38 percent pays on a balance a household would actually keep
The arithmetic is unforgiving because the rate is small, not because the math is complicated. At 0.38 percent, $5,000 earns about $19 over a year. Ten thousand dollars earns $38. Twenty-five thousand dollars — a serious emergency fund, the kind that takes years to build — earns roughly $95, before any account fee is subtracted from it.
One detail in the FDIC’s own footnotes sharpens this. The savings and interest-checking averages are measured at the $2,500 product tier, meaning the rate is the one a bank advertises for a balance of that size. So 0.38 percent is not a penalty rate applied to tiny deposits. It is the going rate at a balance most savers would consider healthy, published in the FDIC’s monthly national rates and rate caps table.
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The rest of the table is worth reading before moving any money
Savings is not the worst line on the page. Interest checking averages 0.07 percent, which on $10,000 produces $7 across twelve months. Money market accounts, a separate product that is easy to confuse with savings, average 0.65 percent — close to double the savings rate for something most depositors think of as roughly the same kind of account.
Certificates of deposit pay more, and they do not pay more the longer the money is locked up. The six-month CD averages 1.38 percent, the twelve-month averages 1.68 percent, and the sixty-month averages 1.36 percent. A saver who ties up money for five years averages less than one who commits for a single year. That inversion is visible on the table and is a reason to treat “longer term equals better rate” as an assumption worth testing rather than a rule.
Why this average lands lower than almost any rate in an advertisement
The FDIC does not compute a simple average of advertised rates. Under the rule its board adopted in December 2020, effective April 2021, the national rate is the average of rates paid by all insured depository institutions and credit unions for which data is available, with each institution’s rate weighted by its share of domestic deposits. Weighting by deposits means the largest banks, which hold the largest pools of household money and generally pay the least on it, pull the average down toward what they pay.
Two more mechanics explain the lag. Money market and CD rates are averaged across the $10,000 and $100,000 product tiers, and every published figure is based on information available as of the last business day of the prior month end. The July 20 reading therefore describes the market as it stood at the end of June.
The 4.38 percent in the right-hand column is not an offer
Alongside 0.38 percent, the savings row shows a national rate cap of 4.38 percent. That number is a supervisory ceiling, not a rate available to customers. It exists to limit what a less than well capitalized institution may offer when soliciting deposits, and for non-maturity accounts it is calculated as the higher of the national rate plus 75 basis points or the federal funds rate plus 75 basis points.
The 3.63 percent printed in the same row is the more revealing figure. Because a savings account has no maturity, there is no comparable Treasury yield to use, so the FDIC substitutes the effective federal funds rate published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On one line of one government table, the overnight cost of money reads 3.63 percent and the average savings account reads 0.38 percent. The gap is the spread the banking system keeps.
When the number moves, and the one thing a low rate does not put at risk
The FDIC publishes this table on the third Monday of every month, moving to the next business day when the third Monday falls on a federal holiday. The reading dated July 20 will be replaced on Monday, August 17, and it will again reflect data as of the last business day of the prior month.
None of this is a safety question. The FDIC states that deposits are automatically insured to at least $250,000 at each FDIC-insured bank, and that coverage applies to checking, savings, money market deposit accounts and CDs alike. A saver moving from a 0.38 percent account to a 1.68 percent twelve-month CD at an insured institution is not trading protection for yield. The protection is identical on both sides of the FDIC’s own table. Only the rate is different, and the agency prints exactly how different, once a month, for anyone who opens the page.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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