What the deposit facility rate is
The deposit facility rate is the interest the Eurosystem pays a bank on money it leaves overnight with its national central bank, whether that is the Bundesbank, the Banque de France or the Central Bank of Ireland. A bank will not lend to another bank overnight for less than it can earn risk-free at the central bank, so the rate sets the floor under short-term euro interest rates. It is one of the three key ECB rates, with the main refinancing rate and the marginal lending rate above it, and the ECB explains how the three fit together on its page on standing facilities.
The rate is set by the Governing Council: the members of the ECB's Executive Board and the governors of the euro area's national central banks. It holds a monetary policy meeting roughly every six weeks, publishes its decisions at 14:15 Frankfurt time on the day, and a change takes effect on a later date, usually the following Wednesday. The same rate applies in every euro country.
For most of the euro's history the headline rate was the main refinancing rate. That changed once banks held far more reserves than they needed: with money left over, the rate that mattered was the one paid on the surplus. In its statement of 13 March 2024 on the operational framework, the Governing Council said it would continue to steer the monetary policy stance through the deposit facility rate. That is why this page leads the euro area trackers.
How a change reaches your mortgage
How quickly a decision reaches you depends on the country you borrow in, because euro mortgage markets are built differently.
- Variable rates linked to Euribor move first. Euribor is what banks charge to lend to each other for set periods, and it moves with where the market expects the deposit facility rate to be. Most Finnish loans and many Spanish ones reset to 12-month Euribor plus a fixed margin once or twice a year, so a change reaches you at your next reset date, not on the day.
- Fixed rates do not move during the fixed period. German borrowers mostly fix for ten years or more, French loans are fixed for their whole term and Dutch borrowers commonly fix for five to ten years. Lenders price new fixes from long-term market rates, which reflect expectations of the whole path of policy rates rather than today's level. A cut that markets saw coming may already be in the rates on offer.
- Irish tracker mortgages follow the main refinancing rate rather than this one; the two move together, so a change here moves a tracker by the same amount.
The country trackers show the average rate on new mortgages in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, France, Spain and Ireland. To see what a change means in euros, put the rate you are quoted into the mortgage calculator for Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Finland, France or Spain.
How it reaches your savings
Banks earn the deposit facility rate on their surplus reserves, so it is the benchmark for what your deposits are worth to them. Overnight and easy-access accounts tend to follow it down quickly and up slowly, and often not all the way. Fixed-term deposits lock in the rate on the day you open them, so a term deposit opened before a cut keeps its rate to maturity.
The savings goal calculator and the compound interest calculator take the rate on your own account. Use what your bank pays, not this rate: the deposit facility rate is paid to banks, not to you.
Reading the chart and the table
The chart draws the rate as steps, because it stays exactly where the Governing Council put it until the next change. Each point in the table is a date a change took effect, as the ECB records it in its table of key interest rates, not the date of the meeting. Meetings that left the rate where it was do not appear.
The series starts with the rate set for the euro's launch on 1 January 1999. For three weeks after that the ECB ran a deliberately narrow corridor to ease the changeover, which is why the rate rises and falls back in January 1999. From June 2014 to July 2022 the rate was below zero, so banks paid to hold reserves. The full series downloads as a CSV with the ECB's own dates and values.