Analysis · HMDA 2025
The same rate, thousands apart
Across 6,807,732 mortgages originated in 2025, the interest rate barely moves between lenders. What they charge to make the loan moves by thousands.
- Fee gap between states
- 4×
- National median fees
- $5,786
- National median rate
- 6.625%
And they have been rising
Median lender fees went from $3,822 in 2021 to $5,786 in 2025 — 51% higher. Some of that is the shift from a refinance market to a purchase market, which carries more points, and some of it is simply the price of writing a loan going up.
| Year | Loans | Median rate | Median fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 15,056,726 | 2.990% | $3,822 |
| 2022 | 8,396,128 | 4.750% | $5,374 |
| 2023 | 5,692,438 | 6.875% | $6,014 |
| 2024 | 6,178,757 | 6.875% | $5,954 |
| 2025 | 6,807,732 | 6.625% | $5,786 |
Where you borrow changes the bill
Median lender fees in the five cheapest states against the five most expensive. The interest rate is not what separates them.
Highest fees
| Hawaii | $9,711 |
| Florida | $7,516 |
| Texas | $7,339 |
| Idaho | $7,153 |
| California | $7,107 |
Inside one city, at one rate
Geography is the easy explanation. The harder one is that lenders serving the same market, at essentially the same interest rate, charge very different amounts to write the loan. Below, each metro's typical rate sits beside the fee range across lenders that made at least 200 loans there — from the 10th to the 90th percentile, so a single odd filer cannot stretch it.
| Metro area | Median rate | Lenders | Fees, 10th–90th pct | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 6.500% | 87 | $1,524 – $11,137 | 7.3× |
| Chicago-Naperville-Schaumburg, IL | 6.750% | 78 | $3,423 – $7,174 | 2.1× |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 6.500% | 101 | $4,236 – $11,070 | 2.6× |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 6.625% | 78 | $3,855 – $10,646 | 2.8× |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA | 6.750% | 67 | $4,901 – $16,648 | 3.4× |
| Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX | 6.490% | 80 | $4,278 – $11,098 | 2.6× |
| New York-Jersey City-White Plains, NY-NJ | 6.625% | 57 | $5,562 – $16,206 | 2.9× |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 6.625% | 58 | $3,771 – $14,972 | 4.0× |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 6.625% | 61 | $2,079 – $7,495 | 3.6× |
| Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC | 6.500% | 56 | $2,878 – $7,804 | 2.7× |
Most of the gap is bought rate
Grouping lenders by how many of their borrowers paid discount points explains most of it. The more a lender's book relies on buying the rate down, the higher its fees — and the less its rate actually falls.
| Share of borrowers paying points | Lenders | Median fees | Median rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| under 20% | 306 | $3,531 | 6.858% |
| 20–40% | 128 | $5,523 | 6.625% |
| 40–60% | 155 | $6,987 | 6.625% |
| over 60% | 93 | $7,887 | 6.607% |
Break-even on that trade
6.9 years
Borrowers at the heaviest-points lenders paid $4,356 more in fees to get a rate 0.251 percentage points lower. On a $250,000 loan over 30 years, that trade takes 83 months to pay for itself — and at seven years the two are within $65 of each other.
What this does and does not show
Points are a legitimate product. A borrower who genuinely intends to keep a loan for a decade is right to buy the rate down, and a lender whose customers mostly do that will show high fees for an entirely honest reason. Nothing here says otherwise.
What the numbers do show is how narrow the payoff window is. The trade the market is actually making — roughly four thousand dollars up front for a quarter point of rate — comes out even at about seven years. Americans do not keep mortgages that long on average. They move, and they refinance whenever rates drop enough to make it worthwhile. For a large share of the borrowers in this data, the money paid at closing will not be recovered.
The second thing worth noticing is that this is not primarily a story about which lender is expensive. It is a story about a decision borrowers are asked to make at the worst possible moment — at closing, comparing offers whose disclosed APRs make the high-fee option look better, precisely because the APR spreads those fees across thirty years nobody expects to stay for.
Caveats
No credit scores. HMDA does not publish them, and score is the largest driver of pricing. Some of the fee variation between lenders reflects who they serve rather than what they charge.
Fees track the product mix. Government-backed lending carries different costs than conventional, and purchase loans differ from refinances. A lender concentrated in FHA purchases will show higher fees before any difference in markup.
Medians, not distributions. Half of each lender’s borrowers paid more than the figure shown.
Third-party costs are excluded. Title, appraisal and settlement are real money and are not in these numbers — they are not lender charges.
Every figure here is recomputed from the source data on each build; the methodology sets out the thresholds and the sanitation rules. The underlying records are public, and anyone can reproduce this.