10-Year Treasury Yield Today: Latest Close, Chart and Guide

The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield is the interest rate the U.S. government pays to borrow for ten years. Mortgage rates and corporate borrowing costs move with it, and so do the prices investors are willing to pay for stocks. The box above shows the latest close and is updated after each U.S. trading day. Every Wednesday we also publish a longer analysis based on the Tuesday close, and each of those analyses is listed at the bottom of this page.

Our Weekly Readings

• Latest close in our archive: 5.22% on October 13, 2026.
• Archive range: a low of 4.42% (June 30, 2026) and a high of 5.27% (October 6, 2026).
• Coverage: 15 Tuesday sessions from June 23, 2026 to October 13, 2026, a net change of +73 basis points.

What the 10-Year Yield Measures

When the Treasury sells a 10-year note, it promises fixed interest payments and the return of the face value at maturity. After the auction, those notes trade every day in the secondary market. The yield is the annual return a buyer locks in at the current market price. Price and yield move in opposite directions: if investors sell notes and push the price down, a new buyer pays less for the same fixed payments, so the yield rises. When demand for safety or expectations of lower rates push prices up, the yield falls. Financial news often describes this from the price side, so “bonds sold off” means prices fell and yields rose.

Two versions show up in our weekly posts. ^TNX is the Cboe index that tracks the 10-year yield during the trading day, and we quote it as a percentage. DGS10 is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) constant-maturity series, which is published with about a one-business-day lag. The two usually differ by only a few hundredths of a percentage point, but DGS10 can trail a fast-moving market by a session.

What Moves the 10-Year Yield

It helps to think of the 10-year yield as three pieces added together.

• Expected short-term rates. Investors compare a 10-year note with rolling over short-term Treasury bills for a decade. If they expect the Federal Reserve to keep its policy rate high for years, the 10-year yield has to stay high too.
• Expected inflation. Fixed payments lose purchasing power when prices rise, so lenders demand more compensation when inflation looks sticky. Hot CPI reports often lift the 10-year yield within minutes.
• Term premium. This is the extra return investors want for tying up money for ten years instead of rolling short-term bills. It tends to rise when government borrowing needs grow, when inflation is hard to predict, or when large buyers step back.

The first piece is where the Fed matters, but only indirectly. The Fed sets an overnight rate, not the 10-year yield. After the Fed cut rates by half a point in September 2024, the 10-year yield actually rose by roughly a full percentage point over the following four months, as investors priced in fewer future cuts and a larger term premium.

Reading Yield Changes: Basis Points and Percent

Bond traders measure yield moves in basis points. One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point, so a move from 4.50% to 4.75% is 25 basis points. Our weekly posts show the daily and weekly change in ^TNX as a percent change of the yield itself, the same way we show stock moves. That keeps the tables consistent, but the numbers need converting. A 2% rise in the yield from 5.00% is 10 basis points, not two percentage points.

The conversion depends on the starting level: multiply the yield by the percent change and read the result as basis points.

As a rough guide, daily moves of a few basis points are routine for the 10-year. Moves of 10 basis points or more in a day usually follow a surprise in inflation data, the jobs report, or Fed communication. A weekly move of 25 basis points or more signals a real repricing of rate expectations.

Why the 10-Year Yield Matters for Stocks

The 10-year yield feeds into stock prices through several channels. The most direct is valuation. Analysts value a company by discounting its future profits, and the 10-year yield is the base of that discount rate. When it rises, profits expected far in the future are worth less today. That is why growth-heavy indexes such as the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) often fall more than the broader S&P 500 (SPY) on days when yields jump, a gap our SPY vs QQQ guide tracks week by week.

Yields also set the bar that stocks have to clear. When a Treasury held to maturity pays 5%, stocks need to offer noticeably more to justify their risk than when the 10-year paid 2%. Higher yields raise borrowing costs across the economy as well. The average 30-year mortgage rate has usually run around 1.5 to 2 percentage points above the 10-year yield, although the gap widened to nearly 3 points in 2023. And higher U.S. yields tend to draw in foreign money and lift the dollar, which can weigh on the overseas earnings of large multinationals.

None of this makes rising yields automatically bad for stocks. Yields often climb because the economy is strong, which also supports profits. Trouble tends to start when yields rise quickly or for the wrong reason, such as inflation fears, because discount rates go up without a matching boost to earnings. Speed matters as much as level: a 30-basis-point jump in one week usually hurts stocks more, and does more to lift the VIX, than a slow drift to the same yield over several months.

The Yield Curve

The 10-year yield is most informative when compared with shorter maturities. Normally the curve slopes upward, with longer maturities paying more. When short-term yields rise above the 10-year, the curve is inverted, which has preceded most U.S. recessions over the past half century. The two spreads watched most closely are the 10-year minus the 2-year and the 10-year minus the 3-month bill. The signal is not a timing tool: the 3-month to 10-year curve stayed inverted for roughly two years starting in late 2022, one of the longest stretches on record.

Historical Context

The 10-year yield peaked near 15.8% in late 1981, when the Fed was fighting double-digit inflation. It then spent four decades trending lower and hit a record closing low of about 0.5% in August 2020, during the pandemic. The move back above 4% in 2022 was one of the fastest rises in modern history, and the yield briefly touched 5% in October 2023, the first time since 2007, without closing above it. It broke through in 2026: on October 5 the 10-year closed at 5.31%, above its 2007 peak of 5.26% and the highest close since May 2002. Our explainer, Why the 10-Year Treasury Yield Hit Its Highest Level Since 2002, breaks down how much of that rise came from real yields and how much from inflation expectations. Yields around 5% are high compared with the 2010s but ordinary compared with the decades before 2008.

Weekly Treasury Yield Analysis Archive

Every Wednesday we publish a Treasury yield analysis based on the previous Tuesday’s U.S. session close, showing ^TNX next to FRED’s DGS10, SPY, QQQ, the largest technology stocks, the dollar, oil, and the latest Fed, CPI, and jobs data. Each date below links to the full analysis. Yields are the ^TNX closes used in each post, and the last column shows the change from the previous entry in basis points.

This page is for educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Please read our Financial Disclaimer.