Real Interest Rates: 10-Year US Treasury Yield Minus CPI Inflation, Monthly Since 1962

Real Interest Rates, the 10-year US Treasury yield minus year-over-year CPI inflation, is one of the most consequential variables in macroeconomics. It sets the true cost of long-term borrowing, the real return on savings, and the discount rate applied to all long-duration assets. This dataset is an Eco3min monthly composite that pairs the month-end 10-year nominal Treasury yield (FRED series DGS10) with year-over-year CPI inflation (FRED series CPIAUCSL) to deliver a clean, four-column file of Real Interest Rates from January 1962 onward, one row per month, structured for monetary policy research, quantitative analysis, and academic use.

Based on FRED series: DGS10 (10Y Treasury) and CPIAUCSL (CPI-U) · Latest observation: 2026-09-01

Source: FRED series GS10 · Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System · Real yield: Eco3min calculation

Macro Takeaway

Construction & Components

The Real Interest Rates composite is the monthly ex-post real long-term rate: the 10-year US Treasury yield at the end of each month minus the year-over-year CPI inflation rate for the same month. This follows the approximate Fisher equation.

Formula:

Real Interest Rate = DGS10 − CPI YoY

where:
  DGS10   = 10-Year US Treasury Constant Maturity Rate, last daily observation of the month, %
  CPI YoY = (CPIAUCSL_m / CPIAUCSL_m-12 − 1) × 100, %

Components:

• 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate (DGS10), FRED series DGS10, daily observations published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (H.15 release). The monthly value is the last daily observation of the month.
• CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPIAUCSL), FRED series CPIAUCSL, monthly seasonally adjusted index from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The inflation rate is the twelve-month percentage change of the index.

Frequency reconciliation: DGS10 is daily and is reduced to its month-end value; CPIAUCSL is natively monthly. Underlying series: the FRED DGS10 series. No interpolation is applied: FRED carries no CPIAUCSL value for October 2025, after the 2025 federal shutdown, and that month is absent from the file.

Coverage: January 1962 to the latest month with a published CPI print. The series starts in 1962 because the daily DGS10 series begins on 2 January 1962; CPIAUCSL extends back to 1947. Measured by the FRED CPIAUCSL series.

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV and Excel files contain the following four columns.
Each row represents one month.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly.
The real rate is calculated as yield_10y − cpi_yoy (approximate Fisher equation).
Negative values indicate months where inflation exceeded the nominal 10-year yield.
October 2025 is absent: FRED carries no CPI value for that month, and the file leaves the gap rather than interpolating it.

Latest Real Interest Rate

Latest monthly observation: 2026-09-01. A month enters the file once its CPI print is published, around the middle of the following month.

Real Interest Rates by Year (1962–2025)

The table below gives annual averages of the monthly dataset: for each year, the average month-end 10-year Treasury yield,
the average year-over-year CPI inflation rate and the resulting Real Interest Rates value.

Sources: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRED series DGS10), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI-U, FRED series CPIAUCSL).
Real rate = average 10Y yield − average CPI inflation, both rounded to two decimals. 2025 averages eleven months (no October CPI).
Negative real rates indicate periods where inflation exceeded the nominal yield.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full Real Interest Rates dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats.
Both files contain identical data: one row per month since January 1962, with the 10-year Treasury yield, year-over-year CPI inflation and the real interest rate.

FRED Direct CSV Access

This composite is built entirely from publicly available FRED series. Both components can be downloaded directly from FRED for users who prefer to compute Real Interest Rates themselves:

Source FRED series for this composite:

DGS10     — https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=DGS10
CPIAUCSL  — https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=CPIAUCSL

FRED does not publish this ex-post series: its real 10-year rates are market-based (DFII10, TIPS yields since 2003) or model-based (REAINTRATREARAT10Y, since 1982). The raw DGS10 file provides only the daily nominal yield, and the inflation rate must be derived from CPIAUCSL. The Eco3min composite combines both inputs into a clean four-column file (date, yield, inflation, real yield), structured for immediate use in research or quantitative models.

Direct CSV Access: Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/real-10y-treasury-yield.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format.
It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/real-10y-treasury-yield.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

# Display first rows
print(df.head())

# Average real rate over the full period
avg_real = df["real_yield_10y"].mean()
print(f"Average real interest rate since 1962: {avg_real:.2f}%")

# Annual averages
annual = df.groupby(df["date"].dt.year)[["yield_10y", "cpi_yoy", "real_yield_10y"]].mean()
print(annual.tail())

# Months with a negative real rate
negative = df[df["real_yield_10y"] < 0]
print(f"Negative real rate months: {len(negative)}")

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/real-10y-treasury-yield.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

head(df)
summary(df$real_yield_10y)

# Months with a negative real rate
negative <- df[df$real_yield_10y < 0, ]
print(negative)

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

Methodology

The Real Interest Rates dataset is recomputed by an Eco3min pipeline that pulls DGS10 and CPIAUCSL from the FRED API every day except Sunday, at 08:00 UTC. The pipeline keeps the last daily DGS10 observation of each month, computes the twelve-month percentage change of CPIAUCSL, subtracts the second from the first and writes the four-column file (date, yield_10y, cpi_yoy, real_yield_10y). A month enters the file once its CPI print is released, typically around the middle of the following month.

The series is ex-post real: it uses realized year-over-year CPI inflation, not market-implied breakeven inflation from TIPS. An ex-ante version of the long real rate, available from the TIPS market since 2003 (DFII10 on FRED), offers a different angle on real rates but does not extend the historical coverage back to 1962.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Latency for the monthly Real Interest Rates composite is dictated by the slowest input: a month’s value is available only once that month’s CPIAUCSL print is released by the BLS, typically around the middle of the following month. DGS10 is a daily series, so the month-end yield is known weeks earlier.

Revisions to either input propagate to the composite. DGS10 daily observations rarely revise; CPIAUCSL undergoes seasonal-adjustment recalibrations once a year (typically in February), which can shift recent monthly readings slightly. The Eco3min pipeline overwrites historical values on each run to reflect the latest FRED vintage.

No standardized alternative source exists for a long-run ex-post real 10-year rate. Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and academic datasets (Damodaran, Shiller) publish nominal yields and inflation separately, but the composite itself depends on convention choices (monthly-average vs. month-end yield, headline vs. core CPI, realized vs. expected inflation). The Eco3min specification is the month-end nominal yield minus year-over-year headline CPI inflation.

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

The Real Interest Rates composite is the most commonly cited long-run measure of the inflation-adjusted long-term US rate, but its construction imposes specific boundaries on what it can be used to measure.

What it captures:

• The ex-post real cost of long-duration US dollar borrowing for a default-free benchmark issuer
• The gap between the nominal 10-year yield and the inflation rate realized over the previous twelve months
• The long-run discount rate applied to fixed nominal cash flows once realized inflation is netted out

What it does NOT capture (common misinterpretations):

• The market’s expected real rate. This composite uses realized CPI inflation. The ex-ante real rate, derived from TIPS breakevens (DFII10), can diverge meaningfully, especially when inflation surprises occur. The 2021–2022 episode is a textbook case: realized ex-post real rates collapsed deeply negative while ex-ante TIPS real rates were near zero.
• The full real rate curve. This is a single point at the 10-year tenor. The real Fed Funds rate, the real 2-year yield, and the real 30-year yield each behave differently across regimes; the slope between them carries information that any single tenor cannot.
• Credit-risk adjusted real returns. The composite uses default-free Treasury yields. Real corporate borrowing costs are higher by the credit spread (which itself varies with the cycle), and the relevant real rate for a leveraged borrower can be substantially different.
• Duration risk. A negative real interest rate does not mean a 10-year Treasury holder lost money in real terms: bond prices also move with the yield. The real total return on the 10Y Treasury over any holding period can diverge sharply from the real yield shown here.

Used responsibly, the series is a clean descriptive measure of the long-run real rate regime; analytical interpretations of its level, trend, and relationship to equity valuations are explored in the companion US Real Interest Rates History study.

Historical Regimes

1962–1965: Stable positive real rates under Bretton Woods.
Real Interest Rates averaged 2.78% between January 1962 and December 1965, anchored by low and stable inflation within the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. The month-end 10-year yield stayed between 3.85% and 4.65%, while year-over-year inflation never exceeded 1.93%.

1966–1980: The Great Inflation and negative real rates.
As inflation accelerated through the late 1960s and 1970s, nominal yields failed to keep pace. The 10-year real rate was negative in 48 of the 180 months of the period, with annual averages of −3.41% in 1974 and −1.92% in 1980 and a monthly low of −4.70% in December 1974. The Federal Reserve under Arthur Burns and G. William Miller was consistently behind the curve, allowing inflation expectations to become unanchored.

1981–2000: Volcker disinflation and historically high real rates.
The Volcker shock produced the highest Real Interest Rates of the series. As annual average inflation fell from 13.53% in 1980 to 3.16% in 1983, nominal yields declined more slowly: the annual real rate reached 8.02% in 1983 and 8.12% in 1984, and the monthly series peaked at 9.58% in May 1984. Real rates averaged 4.57% over 1981–2000 and were positive in every month of the period, as markets demanded a persistent inflation risk premium even as actual inflation remained contained.

2001–2019: Secular decline toward zero.
Real Interest Rates averaged 1.16% over 2001–2019, against 4.57% over the previous two decades, a decline commonly attributed to the global savings glut, aging demographics, declining potential growth and successive rounds of quantitative easing. The path was not steady: the annual average turned negative in 2008 (−0.22%), jumped to 3.60% in 2009 as year-over-year CPI inflation averaged −0.31%, and was negative again in 2011 (−0.39%) and 2012 (−0.32%). From 2016 to 2019 it ranged between 0.20% and 0.56%.

2020–2026: Pandemic shock, negative real rates, and normalization.
The pandemic period produced the deepest negative readings of the series: the monthly real rate reached −6.25% in March 2022, below the 1974 low, and the annual average was −3.22% in 2021 and −5.00% in 2022, as CPI inflation surged while the Fed initially kept rates near zero. The real rate turned positive again in June 2023 (+0.74%) after 36 consecutive negative months, and the annual average reached 1.29% in 2024 and 1.57% in 2025 (eleven months, October missing). In 2026 it fell from 1.87% in January to 0.28% in May, then stood at 1.45% in July and 1.40% in August. The structural question of where the “neutral” real rate settles, the r* debate, is examined in the companion US Real Interest Rates History study and in the Real Interest Rates vs CAPE Ratio analysis.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

The Real Interest Rates series at the 10-year tenor is the most-cited long-run real rate measure, but it sits within a broader rate ecosystem. Combining it with shorter-tenor real rates and the underlying nominal and inflation series maps the full real rate curve.

Related Research

The interpretation of long-run Real Interest Rates (their relationship with equity valuations, currency dynamics, and inflation regimes) is examined in the following Eco3min studies.

Macroeconomic Dataset Hub

This dataset is part of the Eco3min macro-financial data repository.
Explore all available datasets including inflation, interest rates, equity returns,
and currency indicators.

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Sources

• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate (FRED series GS10)
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, seasonally adjusted (FRED series CPIAUCSL)

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). Real Interest Rates: 10-Year US Treasury Yield Minus CPI Inflation, Monthly (1962–2026).

Real Interest Rates: 10-Year US Treasury Yield Minus CPI Inflation, Monthly Since 1962