Posted Rate
Taux affiché in French
Quick definition
The posted rate is the official sticker rate a bank publishes for its mortgages. Almost nobody actually pays it: negotiated rates typically sit far below. Its main real-world effect is inflating prepayment penalties, since big banks compute the interest rate differential from posted rates.
The sticker price nobody pays
Walk into a big bank branch or open its rates page and you will see posted mortgage rates. Then talk to an advisor or a broker and you will be quoted something far lower, typically 1.5 to 2.5 or more percentage points below posted (as of July 2026). The discounted rate is the real market; the posted rate is a sticker price that exists mostly for other purposes.
This is not a secret or a loophole. Discounting off posted is how big-bank mortgage pricing has worked for decades, and the banks themselves advertise "special offer" rates well below their own posted numbers.
Why posted rates still exist
If nobody pays them, why keep publishing them? Three reasons, and the first is the one that costs borrowers real money.
- Penalty math. When a big bank calculates the interest rate differential on a broken fixed mortgage, it starts from posted rates and applies your original discount to the comparison rate. That machinery routinely inflates the prepayment penalty by thousands of dollars versus a calculation using real rates. Posted rates persist in large part because they make breaking a mortgage expensive.
- A negotiation anchor. A big visible number makes any discount feel like a win. A "1.5% discount" off an inflated sticker can still leave you above the true market rate.
- Product pricing. Cashback mortgages, some no-frills products, and certain contract clauses are priced or defined relative to posted rates, so the banks need an official reference to point to.
How to shop around it
Compare offers to the market, not to the size of the discount off posted. A mortgage broker's rate sheet, the special offers other lenders advertise, and online rate comparison sites all show what borrowers actually pay. If a bank frames its offer as a generous discount, ignore the framing and compare the final rate against those benchmarks. And since the posted rate can come back to bite you through the penalty formula, ask any big-bank lender to show its penalty calculation before you sign, not just its rate.
In Canada
Posted rates once had an official job: the mode average of the big banks' posted 5-year rates served as the benchmark for Canada's mortgage stress test before the current minimum qualifying rate structure replaced that role. Today their main systemic footprint is the penalty math inside big-bank mortgage contracts.
Monoline lenders, the mortgage-only lenders sold through brokers, generally have no posted rates at all: the rate they quote is the rate, and their penalties are computed from real rates. That structural difference is one of the strongest practical arguments for comparing beyond the big banks.
Worked example: the discount that was not a deal
Nadia's bank posts a 5-year fixed rate of 6.5% and offers her a "special" 1.5% discount, so 5.0% (illustrative numbers, as of July 2026). It feels generous until she checks a broker, who quotes 4.4% from a monoline lender for the same term. The bank's discount was measured against its own sticker, not against the market: the real comparison was 5.0% versus 4.4%, a gap worth about $10,000 of interest over five years on a $350,000 mortgage.
The posted rate would also have followed her into the contract: had she signed with the bank and broken the mortgage early, her penalty would have been computed from posted rates, likely several times what the monoline lender would charge.
Reviewed by Alexandre Bernier, CFP®, CIM®, PFP®·Updated July 2026