Savings accounts across the American banking system paid a little less on average in September than in the month before. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s monthly national rate for savings came in at 0.37 percent, down from 0.38 percent in August. The move is a single hundredth of a percentage point, but it ended a run in which the figure had barely budged for months, and it sits next to a regulatory ceiling more than eleven times higher.
What the FDIC’s “National Rate: Savings” series actually measures
The number belongs to a series the FDIC publishes under the title “National Rate: Savings,” part of its monthly National Rates and Rate Caps release. It is a rate, not a yield on any single product, and it should not be read as what a particular bank is paying a particular customer. According to the series page maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the national rate represents “the average of rates paid by all insured depository institutions and credit unions for which data is available, with rates weighted by each institution’s share of domestic deposits.”
Two parts of that sentence matter. First, it is an average across institutions, so it blends the largest banks, whose savings products tend to dominate deposits, with thousands of smaller banks and credit unions. Second, the weighting is by each institution’s share of domestic deposits, which means a few very large institutions pull the figure harder than hundreds of small ones. An account paying well above 0.37 percent and an account paying well below it can both exist without contradicting the series, because the number describes the middle of the deposit-weighted pack and not any account in it.
The same page states the methodology took effect on April 1, 2021, following an FDIC Board final rule approved December 15, 2020. That rule is the reason the series exists in its current form: the national rate feeds directly into the rate cap that applies to weaker institutions, discussed below.
Five months at 0.38 percent, then 0.37 in September
The FDIC’s own series, as redistributed in the St. Louis Fed’s FRED data table, lists the five most recent monthly observations as 0.37 percent for September 2026, then 0.38 percent for each of August, July, June and May. The table was last updated September 21, 2026, at 1:02 p.m. Central time. That is the sense in which the rate “slipped”: it held at 0.38 percent from May through August and then lost one hundredth of a point.
A slip that small does not by itself say that banks have started cutting savings rates in earnest. A flat line followed by a one-notch decline is what a deposit-weighted average looks like when most large institutions leave posted rates alone and a handful adjust. The series reports the level and the change; the FDIC release does not, in the pages read for this report, attribute the September decline to any particular bank or group of banks.
The level is the more telling detail. At 0.37 percent, the national figure is a small fraction of the rates most savers see advertised by online banks and promotional offers, which are not captured by an average weighted toward the largest deposit-takers. The gap between the headline average and the best offers is a long-standing feature of the savings market, and the FDIC series is the benchmark that makes the gap measurable.
The 4.38 percent rate cap is a different series with a different job
A separate FDIC series, “National Rate Cap: Savings,” reads 4.38 percent for September 2026, according to the St. Louis Fed’s page for the cap. The two figures are easy to confuse because they sit side by side in the same monthly release, but they measure different things. The national rate describes what institutions pay on average. The cap is a ceiling that applies only to institutions that are less than well capitalized, restricting them from soliciting deposits “by offering rates that significantly exceed rates in its prevailing market.”
The cap is calculated as the higher of two formulas: the national rate plus 75 basis points, or 120 percent of Treasury yields plus 75 basis points. Because 0.37 percent plus 75 basis points would come to only 1.12 percent, the published 4.38 percent can only have come from the Treasury-based formula. In other words, the cap is currently set by Treasury yields and not by the savings average, which is why the one-hundredth slip in the national rate did not move the ceiling in any visible way. Undercapitalized institutions that operate inside a defined local market can instead use a local cap equal to 90 percent of the highest rate competitors offer there for the same deposit product.
That distinction is the one most often lost when the numbers are quoted. A headline reading “savings rate cap rises” and a headline reading “savings rate slips” can both be true in the same month, because one tracks Treasury-linked regulation of weaker banks and the other tracks the deposit-weighted average rate on ordinary savings accounts.
The 12-month CD national rate stands at 1.73 percent
The same release carries a certificate of deposit series. The FDIC’s “National Rate: 12 Month CD” series stood at 1.73 percent in September 2026, according to its St. Louis Fed series page, which was also last updated September 21, 2026. It uses the same deposit-weighted methodology as the savings figure, with data running from April 2021 to the present.
Set beside the savings rate, the 12-month CD average is about 1.36 percentage points higher, a difference that reflects what the series records, namely that institutions pay more on average to lock money up for a year than to hold it in an account that can be emptied any day. The CD figure is, like the savings figure, an average across institutions and not the rate on any one certificate.
How the figures were checked, and what the FDIC’s own page returned
The FDIC publishes these rates on its own National Rates and Rate Caps page, but fdic.gov returned an HTTP 403 error on repeated attempts when this report was prepared on October 4, 2026, so the figures above were read from the FDIC series as carried by the St. Louis Fed’s FRED service, which names the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as the source on each page. The September 2026 observation of 0.37 percent and the August 2026 observation of 0.38 percent agree across the series page and the data table. Anyone who wants the originating release can find it on the FDIC’s national rates page; the monthly update was posted September 21, 2026, according to the St. Louis Fed’s record of the release.
Which account an interest-rate average does not decide
The FDIC’s 0.37 percent national savings rate and 1.73 percent CD average describe what the deposit market pays; neither says which account a retiree should draw down first. That sequencing question, savings before an IRA or the reverse, is a separate piece of retirement arithmetic that the rate series leaves untouched.
The Retirement Tax & Withdrawal Planner is a 12-page planner with four calculators (provisional income, IRMAA tier, RMD schedule, Roth bracket fill) and the account withdrawal order, laid out so a retiree can work through the sequence on paper.
Open The Retirement Tax & Withdrawal Planner →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the figures were checked against the FDIC series as published by the St. Louis Fed’s FRED service.
