UK Bank Rate: Bank of England Official Interest Rate, Monthly Data Since 1975

The Bank of England Bank Rate is the official interest rate set by the Monetary Policy Committee, the rate the Bank pays on commercial banks’ reserves and the anchor for every other sterling interest rate. This dataset gives its monthly average since January 1975, published by the Bank of England in its Interactive Database as series IUMABEDR — 620 observations, from a high of 17.00% in the winter of 1979–80 to a floor of 0.10% between April 2020 and December 2021. The monthly average of Bank Rate equals the official rate in any month without a decision and blends the old and new levels in months when the Committee moved.

Dataset: UK Bank Rate (1975–2026) · Updated 2026-08-01

Source: Bank of England · Interactive Database, series IUMABEDR

Macro Takeaway

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 UK Bank Rate dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats.

Source Data Access — Bank of England

The underlying series is published by the Bank of England’s Interactive Database under code IUMABEDR. The database exports CSV directly, without an API key:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/_iadb-fromshowcolumns.asp?csv.x=yes&Datefrom=01/Jan/1975&Dateto=now&SeriesCodes=IUMABEDR&CSVF=TN&UsingCodes=Y

Direct CSV Access – Eco3min Structured Dataset

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

print(df.tail())
print(df["boe_rate"].describe())

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/uk-boe-bank-rate.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

tail(df)
summary(df$boe_rate)

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

Methodology

The Bank of England publishes Bank Rate as a list of decision dates and levels, and derives from it the monthly average series IUMABEDR: the official rate weighted by the number of days it applied in each month. In a month without a decision the average equals the official rate exactly; in a month with a mid-month move it sits between the old and the new level. This is why the file shows values such as 4.61% for October 2008 or 3.90% for December 2025 that Bank Rate itself never took, and why the discrete steps of the policy rate are visible but softened.

The Eco3min pipeline pulls the series from the Bank’s Interactive Database on each run, dates every observation to the first day of its month, and rebuilds the CSV, Excel and JSON files in full rather than appending, so any upstream restatement propagates automatically. Before May 1997 the rate was set by the Chancellor of the Exchequer rather than by the Bank, and before 1981 the instrument was called Minimum Lending Rate; the Bank’s series treats these as one continuous official rate, which is what makes a 1975-to-present comparison possible.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Source change in September 2026. Until then this dataset carried the OECD’s UK three-month interbank rate, redistributed by FRED as IR3TIB01GBM156N, which stopped updating after January 2026. It was replaced by the Bank of England’s own Bank Rate series. The two are different instruments: the interbank rate is a market price for three-month unsecured money and carries a term and credit premium over the policy rate that widened to several hundred basis points in the autumn of 2008. Anyone who downloaded the earlier file should not splice it with this one. The series now starts in 1975 rather than 1957, because that is where the Bank’s monthly average begins.

Licence. Bank of England statistical data are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0: redistribution is permitted, attribution to the Bank of England is required, and the copyright remains with the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. Eco3min names the Bank as the producer in the schema and in the sources below.

Monthly averaging. Decision months are blended, and intra-month episodes are invisible: the September 1992 exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, when Bank Rate was raised from 10% to 12% and announced at 15% within a single day before both rises were reversed, shows only as a monthly average of 9.56%. Daily decision history is available from the Bank’s own Bank Rate page.

Revisions. Bank Rate is a fixed administrative series and is not revised; the monthly average changes only if the Bank restates the day-weighting, which has not happened in the period covered.

Common Pitfalls When Using This Series

1. Reading the average as the official rate. In a decision month the value is a blend. The December 2025 observation of 3.90% does not mean Bank Rate was 3.90%: it was 4.00% for the first half of the month and 3.75% for the second. Use the Bank’s decision list when the exact level on a given day matters.
2. Reading the level without the inflation regime. A 10% Bank Rate in 1975 sat against inflation above 20% and implied sharply negative real rates; 5.25% in 2023 sat against inflation falling from 10% toward 4%. Nominal levels five decades apart are not comparable as measures of monetary tightness without deflating them.
3. Treating the pre-1997 record as a central-bank series. Until May 1997 the Chancellor set the rate, under exchange-rate and balance-of-payments constraints that included the 1976 IMF programme and the 1990–92 ERM membership. The series is continuous; the institution behind it is not.
4. Confusing Bank Rate with market rates. SONIA, three-month interbank money and gilt yields all embed expectations and risk premia that the policy rate does not. The spread between them and Bank Rate is a signal in its own right, and it is widest precisely in stress episodes such as 2008.

Historical Regimes

1975–1979 – Inflation and the IMF. Bank Rate averaged 10.77% while inflation ran above 20% at its 1975 peak. The rate fell to 5.27% in November 1977 after the 1976 IMF loan stabilised sterling, then climbed back through 1978–79 as inflation re-accelerated.

1979–1982 – The monetarist peak. The series high of 17.00% runs from December 1979 through June 1980, seven consecutive months, the longest stretch at a single double-digit level in the record. Rates then fell to 9.26% by November 1982 as the 1980–81 recession broke inflation.

1985–1992 – Sterling defence and the ERM. Two further peaks, 13.88% in early 1985 and 14.88% from November 1989 to September 1990, both to support the pound. Sterling joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism in October 1990; the commitment ended on 16 September 1992, and Bank Rate fell from 10.38% in early 1992 to 6.88% by December.

1992–2007 – Inflation targeting. The inflation target introduced after the ERM exit and Bank independence in 1997 held the rate inside a 3.50–7.50% band from 1993 to 2007: a low of 3.50% in the second half of 2003, a high of 7.50% in mid-1998, and 5.75% on the eve of the financial crisis in the second half of 2007.

2008–2009 – Collapse to the floor. From 5.00% in September 2008, the Committee cut to 0.50% by March 2009, with the monthly average passing through 4.61% in October, 3.22% in November and 2.14% in December. The March 2009 reading is the first below 1% in the entire series.

2009–2021 – The long floor. Bank Rate stood at 0.50% for 88 consecutive months from April 2009 to July 2016, dipped to 0.25% after the 2016 referendum, edged up to 0.75% in 2018–19, and was cut to 0.10% in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic. It stayed there for twenty-one months, the lowest level in the Bank’s history.

2021–2026 – Tightening and the descent. Fourteen consecutive increases took Bank Rate from 0.10% in November 2021 to 5.25% in August 2023, where it stayed until July 2024. Six cuts followed between August 2024 and December 2025, to 3.75%, and the rate was unchanged through August 2026, the last observation in the file.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

A policy rate is read against its own long end, against the currency, and against the other major policy blocks.

Macroeconomic Dataset Hub

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

Explore the Eco3min Dataset Hub

Sources

• Bank of England – Interactive Database, series IUMABEDR, monthly average of official Bank Rate; published under the Open Government Licence v3.0
• Bank of England – Bank Rate decision history (Monetary Policy Committee), for the underlying decision dates and levels
• Eco3min Research – structured dataset compilation

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). UK Bank Rate: Bank of England Official Rate, Monthly Data (1975–2026).<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/uk-boe-bank-rate-dataset/