This page explains where every number on this site comes from, what has been checked by a person, what has been inferred, and what the site deliberately does not do. If you find it longer than you expected, that's the point — most comparison sites don't tell you this, and I think they should.
Last rate collection: November 2, 2026 at 1:41 PM CST
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 1,188 credit unions every weekday. 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.
Which date governs freshness
There are two dates involved in any rate on this site, and they are not the same thing. The first is the day we last read the credit union's rates page. The second is the date the credit union itself prints on that page — "rates effective September 1", and so on.
Freshness here is measured by the first one. A rate is treated as current if we read it from the lender's live page within the last seven days, regardless of what date the page displays. That's deliberate: plenty of credit unions publish a monthly rate sheet, and some carry a date stamp they simply never update — one large institution currently prints a date from 2023 on a page whose rates change. Judging freshness by the printed date would hide hundreds of institutions whose rates we verified this morning.
Both dates are shown on each institution's page. The rate table's "We read" column is our own read date, and where the credit union publishes its own effective date, that appears underneath, labelled as theirs. If the two disagree, you're seeing exactly what the lender published and exactly when we checked it.
There is one exception. When a credit union's own printed rate date is more than 90 days old and none of its rates have moved in the last 60 days, we treat the page as likely abandoned and withhold that institution from comparison tables, rankings and "lowest rate" callouts. Its own page stays up, with a notice that its published rates appear out of date and a link to the source. Lenders are never withheld on the no-change signal alone.
How rates are checked before publication
Scraping rates is easy. Scraping them correctly, every weekday, 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.
Every number must appear on the page. A rate is only saved if its figures appear in the visible text of the page it was read from — not in hidden code, scripts or page markup. Where a lender publishes both a rate and an APR, both must appear. A page that shows no rates produces no rates here. Rates read from an image are never published without a person checking them first.
New and changed products are held, not published. Every one of the 1,188 credit unions tracked here has been reviewed by hand. I went through each institution's own rate pages individually, recording which mortgage products it publishes, so the scraper knows what it should find. When a read turns up something that doesn't match — a product that appears for the first time, or one that vanishes — it's held for review rather than published automatically.
Review coverage: 1,188 of 1,188 reviewed by hand. New additions are included in this count as they arrive.
An out-of-range check. Each newly read rate and APR is compared with the typical no-points price for that exact product across all lenders the day before. A value far outside that range is held for review, with extra room for rates bought down with discount points or raised by lender credits. The check applies to every rate, including an institution's first, and a lender's own past figures don't exempt it.
What these checks can and can't do: they reliably stop a figure that isn't on the lender's page, and a misread wildly out of line with the market. They cannot tell a plausible misread from a genuinely cheap lender — a wrong 5.75% sits inside the range real credit unions publish. That's why every row links to its source, and why I'd rather hear about an error than assume there isn't one.
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.
Lenders that publish only through a rate calculator
There is one place where we do supply assumptions, because there is no alternative. 7 institutions publish mortgage rates only through a quote tool: the page shows nothing until you enter loan details. The only other choice would be leaving them out entirely.
For these, we submit one fixed standard scenario: a $450,000 purchase price, a $360,000 loan (20% down), a 780 credit score, a single-family home used as a primary residence, the institution's head-office ZIP code, and, where the tool asks for it, an assumed income of $4,000 or $12,000 a month. Refinance quotes use the same figures. The scenario is stored with every rate it produced. Because the tool determines the result from what we enter, a different scenario would produce a different rate.
Every one of those rates is labelled "Quoted scenario" wherever it appears, and the label opens to show the exact inputs. If you click through to the source, you'll find a form rather than our number; the label is how you know where the number came from. Because a figure we generated isn't quite like a lender's own published table, these rates stay in every table and ranking but are never used for a "Lowest APR" callout or the #1 spot on a state page.
Separately, roughly 60 institutions publish through a rate widget that shows its own default scenario (a set loan amount, down payment and credit score chosen by the lender). Those are the lender's own published figures and aren't labelled, but they do reflect that lender's default assumptions rather than a universal quote.
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:
- 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 157 are open to anyone in the United States, usually through joining an affiliated association or a small one-time donation.
- 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:
1,186 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.
2 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 every weekday, 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