What the main refinancing rate is
The main refinancing operations are the Eurosystem's regular weekly loans to banks: a bank borrows central bank money for one week and pledges eligible collateral, such as government bonds, against it. The main refinancing rate is the interest it pays. The ECB describes these and its other lending on its page on open market operations.
The rate is set by the Governing Council at its monetary policy meetings, about every six weeks, together with the deposit facility rate below it and the marginal lending rate above it. Since 15 October 2008 the weekly operations have been fixed rate tenders with full allotment: a bank with enough collateral gets all it asks for at the rate the Governing Council set.
For the first two decades of the euro this was the headline rate, the "refi rate" that news reports quoted. Banks then borrowed from the central bank to meet their needs, so the price of that borrowing set market rates. Once the ECB's asset purchases and long-term loans left banks with far more reserves than they needed, overnight rates sank towards the deposit facility rate instead, and that became the rate that steers policy.
The Governing Council's statement of 13 March 2024 made that formal. It confirmed that policy is steered through the deposit facility rate, kept the weekly operations at the centre of how banks get liquidity, and narrowed the gap between this rate and the deposit facility rate from 50 to 15 basis points from 18 September 2024. Since then every decision has moved both by the same amount, so the 15-point gap holds.
Where you meet it: Irish tracker mortgages
Few borrowers outside Ireland meet this rate directly. Variable mortgages elsewhere in the euro area are priced from Euribor, which follows market expectations of the deposit facility rate, and fixed rates come from longer-term market rates.
In Ireland, a tracker mortgage is a loan whose rate tracks a published rate, as the Central Bank of Ireland explains, and that rate is typically the ECB's main refinancing rate plus a fixed margin set in the loan agreement. Your rate moves by exactly the amount this rate moves, from the date your lender applies the change. Trackers are a legacy product held by borrowers who took them out years ago; new Irish borrowers choose between fixed rates and the lenders' own variable rates, which the Ireland mortgage rate tracker follows.
If you have a tracker, add your margin to the current rate on this page and put the total into the mortgage calculator for Ireland to see your payment after the next change.
Reading the chart and the table
The chart draws the rate as steps, and each point is a date a change took effect, as the ECB's table of key interest rates records it, usually the Wednesday after a meeting. The ECB publishes the rate as two series, and this page joins them:
- from 1 January 1999 to 27 June 2000, the fixed rate of fixed rate tenders;
- from 28 June 2000 to 14 October 2008, the minimum bid rate of variable rate tenders, the lowest rate at which a bank could bid for funds. Banks often paid a little more, so the rate they actually paid in those years was above the line on the chart;
- from 15 October 2008, the fixed rate again.
On 28 June 2000 the minimum bid rate started at the fixed rate it replaced, so no change shows on that date. The CSV download carries the joined series with the ECB's own dates and values.