Home loan rates in 2026: what changed, and what it does to the instalment

This is the one guide on the site that is about the market rather than about the contract, and it will date faster than the others. Everything below is as reported up to early October 2026, with the source and date for each figure listed at the end. The point is not the exact numbers, which will have moved by the time you read this, but the direction, and what a few points of rate do to a real instalment.

The short version

• The State Bank’s policy rates have not moved since June 2023.
• Deposit rates rose sharply in the first half of 2026, and the average rate on new deposits across the system reached 6.38% in September.
• Promotional home loan rates, which started at around 5% to 6% at the large state banks in 2025, ranged from 7% to 13.2% across seventeen banks surveyed in September 2026.
• The State Bank has twice in 2026 asked banks to bring rates down, and they have come off their spring peak, but they have not gone back to 2025 levels.

Why mortgage rates follow deposit rates, not the policy rate

The State Bank’s refinancing rate has been 4.5% and its rediscount rate 3.0% since 19 June 2023, and the State Bank confirmed both unchanged again in April and in October 2026. Yet home loan rates rose by several points over the same period. The reason is in the floating-rate formula. Most banks define the reference rate of a home loan by reference to their own deposit rates, often the twelve or twenty-four month rate, or an average of the large state banks’ rates. When banks compete for deposits, the reference rate rises and every floating loan tied to it rises too, whatever the central bank’s headline rate is doing. How that formula works is set out in base rate plus margin.

That is what happened in 2026. The twelve-month deposit rate at the four large state-owned banks was between 4.6% and 4.8% in November 2025. It was 5.2% at all four in February 2026, rose further in March, and stood at about 5.9% in early October. The system-wide average rate on new deposits was 6.38% on 20 September 2026, 1.15 points higher than at the end of 2025. The average rate on new loans was 8.38% in April.

Where home loan rates went

One pattern stands out in the 2026 figures: longer fixed periods were priced much higher than short ones. A bank fixing at 9.6% for six months and at nearly 14% for two years is telling you what it expects its own funding to cost. A borrower choosing a short, cheap fixed period is betting that the bank is wrong.

The worked example at 2026 prices

The example used across this site is 2.4 billion dong over twenty years on equal principal, 6.9% for twelve months, then a base rate of 8.5% plus a 3 point margin. Re-running it in the engine with rates closer to the autumn 2026 market:

Three things follow. The first instalment at a 2026 promotional rate is 5.2 million dong a month more than the site’s example, before anything has floated. The shock in month thirteen is smaller, 23.4% instead of 37.5%, because the promotion is less generous, which is not good news; it means less of the cost was hidden. And moving from the site example to the 13% scenario adds 387 million dong of interest over the term, of which 130.5 million comes from the floating rate alone being 0.6 of a point higher than in the 12.4% scenario.

For a household with 55 million dong of monthly income, the month thirteen instalment goes from 57.9% of income in the site example to 63.1% in the 13% scenario. Both are above any threshold a careful lender would accept, which is why the affordability arithmetic in how much can you actually borrow matters more in 2026 than it did a year earlier.

What to do with a market like this

1. Ask what the reference rate is made of. If it is tied to the bank’s own deposit rate, the 2026 rise in deposit rates is already in your future instalments.
2. Compare fixed periods on the effective rate, not the headline. A cheap six-month fix and an expensive two-year fix are only comparable once both are priced over the full term, as described in one number for the whole loan.
3. Look hard at the early repayment fee. If rates fall in 2027, the way out is refinancing, and the fee decides whether it pays. Fee schedules reported in early 2026 ranged from 1% for five years to 2% in years one to three.
4. Stress test from today’s rate, not last year’s. Put the floating rate two points above the current figure in the loan inspector and check the instalment still fits.

This guide will be revised as rates move. The guides on contract structure will not need to be: a margin, a fee tier and a reset date cost the same arithmetic in any market.