France Bank Mortgage Spread: Mortgage Rate Minus 10-Year OAT Since 2014

The France bank mortgage spread is an Eco3min composite: the average rate on new fixed-rate housing loans to French households, minus the yield on the 10-year French sovereign bond. It measures the gap between what French banks charge borrowers and the sovereign benchmark that anchors their funding costs, monthly since December 2014. No institution publishes this series natively — it exists here because the two components are combined by an Eco3min calculation. The France bank mortgage spread has been negative in 31 of its 137 months, in two distinct episodes.

Dataset: France Bank Mortgage Spread (2014–2026) · Updated 2026-04-01

Source: Banque de France (MIR1) and ECB (IRS) · Eco3min composite

Macro Takeaway

Construction & Components

The composite isolates what the retail price of credit adds to, or subtracts from, the sovereign benchmark. It removes the level of interest rates from the picture and leaves only the gap, which makes episodes of margin compression visible in a way that neither component shows on its own.

Formula:

Bank Mortgage Spread = New fixed-rate mortgage rate − 10-year OAT yield

Components:

• New fixed-rate housing loan rate — Banque de France, MIR1 dataset — monthly. The effective rate on the loan itself, excluding borrower insurance and fees. Sets the retail side of the spread.
• French 10-year sovereign yield — ECB, IRS dataset, long-term interest rate for convergence purposes — monthly. The benchmark against which euro-denominated long-duration credit is priced. Sets the reference side of the spread.

Frequency reconciliation: Both components are natively monthly. The pipeline aligns them with a backward as-of merge on the first day of each month; no interpolation is applied and no observation is synthesised. The composite starts in December 2014, the first month of the MIR series.

Coverage: December 2014 to April 2026, limited by the start of the Banque de France MIR series on the retail side, not by the sovereign series, which runs from 1986.

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV, Excel and JSON files contain the following columns.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full France bank mortgage spread series, including both components, is available in CSV and Excel formats.

Direct Data Access

No upstream source publishes this composite. The two components can be retrieved separately from the Banque de France Webstat API (registration required) and the ECB Data Portal. The Eco3min structured dataset returns the composite and both inputs aligned on one grid:

Direct CSV Access — Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-bank-mortgage-spread.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format. It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool. JSON and XLSX are available at the same path with the corresponding extension.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-bank-mortgage-spread.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

print(df.head())
print(df["bank_spread"].describe())

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-bank-mortgage-spread.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

head(df)
summary(df$bank_spread)

Both examples load the dataset directly from the URL — no download or API key required.

Methodology

The composite is recomputed daily by an Eco3min pipeline that pulls both components, aligns them on the monthly grid using a backward as-of merge, and takes the difference. Both inputs are already monthly, so no interpolation is applied and no observation is synthesised.

Latency is set by the slower component. The ECB publishes the French long-term rate within weeks of month end, while the Banque de France publishes the MIR mortgage rate with roughly a five to six week lag; the composite therefore cannot be fresher than the MIR release. When either component is revised upstream, the affected months of the composite are rewritten at the next run rather than patched.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Latency is dictated by the Banque de France MIR release, roughly five to six weeks after month end. The ECB component is available sooner, so the composite always waits on the retail side.

Revisions propagate. When the Banque de France restates a past MIR observation, or the ECB revises the long-term rate, the corresponding months of the composite change at the next Eco3min run. The full CSV is rewritten each time rather than appended, so a downloaded file is a snapshot, not a permanent record.

No native alternative exists. Neither the Banque de France nor the ECB publishes this difference as a series, and no commercial data provider offers it as a ready-made instrument. That is the point of the composite — and also the reason no external benchmark exists to validate it against.

What This Index Captures (And What It Doesn’t)

The composite is a structural indicator of the pricing gap between retail mortgage credit and the sovereign benchmark. It is not a measure of bank profitability and not a market-timing tool.

What it captures:

• Episodes where the retail price of credit failed to follow a move in sovereign yields, in either direction
• The regulatory effect of the usury ceiling, visible as the 2022 compression and its 2023 reversal
• The difference between a compression driven by regulation and one driven by sovereign risk, by reading the two component columns alongside the spread

What it does NOT capture (common misinterpretations):

• Bank margin. A twenty-year fixed mortgage is not funded at the ten-year sovereign rate. Banks fund through deposits, covered bonds and swaps across a range of maturities, and hedge the duration. The spread is a pricing gap against a reference, not a profit-and-loss measure.
• The full cost to the borrower. The MIR rate excludes borrower insurance, application fees and guarantee costs. The gap between this rate and the annual percentage rate actually signed is material and varies by borrower profile.
• Credit availability. A wide spread does not mean credit is flowing and a negative one does not mean it has stopped. Volumes are governed by lending standards, the usury ceiling and household solvency, none of which appear in this series.
• A maturity-matched comparison. French mortgages run around twenty years while the reference is a ten-year bond. Using a longer sovereign maturity would shift the level of the spread, though not the timing of its turning points.

The series is most useful for dating and characterising episodes of pricing dislocation between retail credit and sovereign yields, read alongside its two component columns.

Historical Regimes

• 2014–2016 — the wide-margin years. The spread peaked at 1.95% in February 2015, its series high. Sovereign yields collapsed under ECB asset purchases faster than banks repriced retail credit, and the gap between the two widened to nearly two points.
• 2016–2021 — competitive compression. The spread narrowed to 0.89% in November 2016 and stayed roughly between 0.8% and 1.1% for five years. Mortgage lending in France is a client-acquisition product rather than a profit centre, and the compression reflects competition for that relationship.
• 2022 — the usury squeeze. The spread fell to −0.99% in October 2022, the series low. Funding costs rose faster than the quarterly usury ceiling allowed banks to reprice; production volumes fell sharply as a result.
• 2023–2024 — the catch-up. Monthly recalculation of the usury ceiling from February 2023 let banks rebuild margin: the spread returned to 0.96% in December 2023, then fell back to 0.10% by December 2024 as sovereign yields rose again on French fiscal concerns.
• 2025–2026 — negative again, for another reason. The spread stands at −0.64% in April 2026, with the OAT at 3.68% and mortgage rates at 3.09%. This time the compression comes from the sovereign side rather than from a regulatory ceiling.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

Related Research

Macroeconomic Dataset Hub

This dataset is part of the Eco3min macro-financial data repository.

Explore the Eco3min Dataset Hub

Sources

• Banque de France — Webstat, MIR1 dataset, new fixed-rate housing loans to households. Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab).
• European Central Bank — Data Portal, IRS dataset, long-term interest rate for convergence purposes, France, 10 years.
• Composite computed by Eco3min from the two series above.

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). France Bank Mortgage Spread (2014–2026). Eco3min composite from Banque de France and ECB data.<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/france-mortgage-spread-dataset/