Methodology

Where the rates come from

Every rate on this site is a publicly advertised rate, collected from the credit union's own website. Nothing here is a quote, an estimate, or a modeled figure, and nothing is supplied by the institutions themselves.

The site checks roughly 1,221 credit unions daily. Each rate row links directly to the page it was taken from, so you can check any number against its source in one click. If a link ever goes to a page that doesn't show the rate we're reporting, that's a bug and I want to hear about it.

How rates are checked before publication

Scraping rates is easy. Scraping them correctly, every day, across a thousand independently designed websites, is not. The usual failure mode isn't that a scraper breaks loudly — it's that a credit union redesigns a page, the scraper quietly starts reading the wrong number, and a wrong rate sits published for weeks because nothing alerted anyone.

Three things guard against that.

A hand-verified product baseline. I am working through all 1,221 institutions individually, recording exactly which mortgage products each one publishes. Once an institution has a baseline, the scraper knows what it should find there. Anything unexpected — a product that disappears, a new one that appears — gets flagged for me to review rather than published automatically. This is about half complete.

New and changed rates are held, not published. When a scrape turns up a rate that doesn't match the expected baseline, the new value goes into a pending queue and the previously verified rate stays on the site until I've looked at it by hand. A rate that vanishes triggers a manual re-check; if it's genuinely gone, it's removed after review rather than automatically.

An automated implausibility guard. Each newly scraped rate and APR is compared against the previous day's market low for that exact product category. If a value comes in more than 0.5 percentage points below that low — or more than 0.5 above it — it is held as pending rather than auto-approved. The allowance widens for discount points, at 0.5 plus 0.4 per point, so a rate bought down with one point gets roughly a 0.9 point allowance before it trips. The check is skipped where that same institution has already published a value in that range for that category, so a genuinely aggressive lender doesn't get flagged every day for being itself.

The practical effect: a misread that turns 6.25% into 2.25%, or into 16.25%, stops before it reaches you.

What we publish about each rate

Three numbers: rate, APR, and points.

APR matters most for comparison, because it folds in lender fees and the cost of any points. A headline rate on its own can be made to look better than it is by burying cost in points, which is why both appear on every row.

Where the institution publishes a disclosure or footnote alongside its rates, that text is captured and shown as-is when you expand a row.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not normalize underwriting assumptions. This is the most important limitation on this page, and it's a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

Credit unions publish their rate assumptions in wildly different terms. One states an 80% loan-to-value ratio. Another states a 740+ credit score. Another advertises 100% financing. Another says nothing at all. There is no honest way to convert those into a single comparable column.

Many sites do it anyway, and produce a table that looks comparable and isn't. I'd rather give you rate, APR, points, and a direct link to the fine print, and let you check the conditions that apply to you. It's a less tidy table. It's a more honest one.

We do not personalize. Nothing here is adjusted for your credit score, down payment, loan amount, or property type. These are advertised rates, which is to say the best case an institution is willing to publish. What you're actually offered may differ.

We do not rank by anything but the numbers. Tables sort by rate and APR. No institution pays for position, and there is no promoted placement to buy.

How eligibility works

This is the part that took the longest to build and is the reason the site exists.

Whether a credit union can write your mortgage depends on two separate things, and both must be true:

1. Membership scope — can you join? Credit unions define who may join in a field-of-membership rule. Most are geographic and written at the county level: anyone who lives, works, worships or attends school in a named county. Some are statewide. Some name specific cities or ZIP codes. And 156 are open to anyone in the United States, usually through joining an affiliated association or a small one-time donation.
2. Lending footprint — will they lend where you are? Separately, each institution originates mortgages in a specific set of states. This is not the same as membership, and conflating the two is the single most common mistake in this space. An institution anyone in the country can join is useless to you if it doesn't write loans in your state.

A credit union appears in your results only where both are satisfied.

Verified versus inferred lending footprints

Not every institution publishes where it lends, and rather than paper over that, the site labels each one:

160 institutions are marked verified. They publish their lending states, and those states have been recorded by hand from the institution's own disclosures. Their pages show the exact count and the states.

1,061 institutions are marked inferred. They don't publish lending states anywhere I could find. For these, the site assumes the institution lends within the geography its own membership rules describe — a reasonable assumption, since a credit union chartered to serve a particular county almost certainly writes mortgages there. But it is an assumption, and every one of those pages says so in plain language rather than presenting it as established fact.

If you're relying on a rate from an institution marked inferred, confirm with them directly before going far.

National benchmarks

Rates are compared throughout the site against national average benchmarks from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) series sourced from Optimal Blue. These are national averages across all lender types — banks, credit unions, and non-bank lenders — and are used to show how credit union rates compare to the broader market. The benchmark source and its update date appear wherever a comparison is shown.

What this site can't tell you

Plainly stated, because these matter:

• Advertised is not offered. Every rate here is what an institution publishes, not what it will quote you.
• Eligibility is geographic only. The site evaluates published geographic membership rules. An institution may have additional requirements — employment, association membership, family relationships — that it doesn't publish, or that we haven't captured. “Likely eligible” means likely, and confirming directly is always the right next step.
• Not every credit union is here. Only those that publish mortgage rates publicly. Many don't, and some of those may be excellent options.
• Membership rules change, and so do lending footprints. We check daily, but there will be lag.
• Rate tables are a starting point, not a decision. Closing costs, service quality, processing speed, and how an institution treats you six months in are all real and none are visible in a rate table.

Reporting an error

If something here is wrong, email admin@curatefinder.com.

This applies especially to credit unions: if a rate, membership rule, or lending state we show for your institution is incorrect, tell me and I'll correct it. I'd rather be told than be wrong.

Who runs this

One person, writing under a pen name, with no licenses and no industry background. The full story and the site's finances — currently, there aren't any — are on the about page.

— Clay Whitfield