10-Year Treasury vs Fed Funds Spread: Long-Run Yield Curve Slope Monthly Since 1954

The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread is an Eco3min monthly composite that captures the full slope from the Federal Reserve’s overnight policy rate to the 10-year Treasury yield. Unlike the more frequently tracked T10Y2Y spread (10Y minus 2Y, available from FRED only since 1976), this composite extends the yield-curve-slope analysis back to 1954 by anchoring the short end on the effective Fed Funds rate (FEDFUNDS) rather than the 2-year yield. The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread directly compares the Fed’s policy rate with the market’s long-term rate — revealing how much the term premium and rate-expectation component combined are compensating for duration risk above the prevailing policy stance.

Dataset: 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread (1954–2026) · Updated —

Source: FRED series GS10 · US Treasury (GS10) & Federal Reserve (FEDFUNDS) via FRED

Macro Takeaway

Construction & Components

The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread is the arithmetic difference between the monthly average 10-year Treasury yield and the monthly average effective Federal Funds rate, expressed in percentage points. Positive values describe a normally upward-sloping policy-to-market curve; negative values describe an inverted curve, where the market’s long-term rate trades below the Fed’s overnight rate.

Formula:

Spread = GS10 − FEDFUNDS

where:
  GS10     = 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate, monthly average, %
  FEDFUNDS = Effective Federal Funds Rate, monthly average, %

Components:

• 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate (GS10) — FRED series GS10 — monthly observations published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System via the H.15 release. Captures the market’s long-term US Treasury yield.
• Effective Federal Funds Rate (FEDFUNDS) — FRED series FEDFUNDS — monthly average of daily transaction-weighted rates, published by the Board of Governors. Represents the actual rate at which reserves are exchanged overnight, which under normal conditions tracks the FOMC’s target rate closely.

Frequency reconciliation: Both inputs are native monthly series with the same FRED date convention (monthly average, dated to the first of the month). No interpolation, alignment, or seasonal adjustment is required.

Coverage: 1954-07 to present. The series starts in July 1954 because both GS10 and FEDFUNDS begin around that date on FRED — GS10 in April 1953, FEDFUNDS in July 1954. The composite respects the more restrictive start date of the two components.

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV and Excel files contain the following columns.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats.

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 the 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread themselves:

Source FRED series for this composite:

GS10      — https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=GS10
FEDFUNDS  — https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=FEDFUNDS

FRED publishes related yield-curve spread series natively (T10Y2Y for 10Y–2Y, T10Y3M for 10Y–3M) but does not provide a 10Y–Fed Funds spread series. The Eco3min composite fills this gap and extends the historical coverage substantially: T10Y2Y starts in 1976, but the 10Y–Fed Funds spread reaches back to 1954, capturing the 1957, 1960, and 1969 inversions that the shorter T10Y2Y series misses entirely.

Direct CSV Access — Eco3min Structured Dataset

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

print(df.head())
print(df["gs10"].describe())

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/yield-curve-slope-10y-ff.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

head(df)
summary(df$gs10)

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

Methodology

The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread is recomputed monthly by an Eco3min pipeline that pulls GS10 and FEDFUNDS from the FRED API at the start of each month, after the previous month’s averages are finalized in the H.15 release. Both series are aligned on the FRED monthly date convention, the difference is computed for each available month, and the composite is written to disk with the four-column schema (date, gs10, fedfunds, spread_10y_ff).

The composite uses monthly-average inputs rather than month-end or daily inputs. This is the same convention used by the most-cited yield-curve research (Estrella & Mishkin, NY Fed recession-probability model) and reduces sensitivity to single-day FOMC-meeting jumps in the Fed Funds rate.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Latency for the 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread is set by the slowest input. Both GS10 and FEDFUNDS monthly averages are published in the H.15 release with a delay of roughly one week after month-end, so the composite is finalized within the first 7–10 days of the following month.

Revisions to either input propagate to the composite, but both series are highly stable: GS10 monthly averages essentially never revise after publication, and FEDFUNDS revisions are limited to occasional corrections of daily trading data that rarely move the monthly average meaningfully.

No standardized alternative source publishes this exact spread. Bloomberg and Refinitiv users typically construct it manually from the same underlying yield and policy rate series. The Eco3min composite provides the calculation ready-made, with the longest available coverage (since 1954) of any yield-curve-slope measure anchored on the actual policy rate.

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

The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread is one of several yield-curve-slope measures, each capturing a slightly different segment of the rate structure. Understanding what this specific spread isolates — and what it doesn’t — matters for correct interpretation.

What it captures:

• The full policy-to-market gap from the Fed’s overnight rate to the 10-year Treasury yield
• The combined term premium and rate-expectation component required by the market above the prevailing Fed Funds rate
• The deepest available history for any yield-curve-slope measure anchored on the policy rate — reaching back to 1954, twenty-two years before T10Y2Y starts

What it does NOT capture (common misinterpretations):

• The pure term premium. The spread combines the term premium (compensation for duration risk) and the expected average future Fed Funds rate over the next 10 years. That expected policy path is anchored on the realized Fed Funds rate, whose role across the monetary cycle is set out in our reading of the Fed Funds rate as the central signal of monetary policy. Decomposing the two requires a model (Adrian-Crump-Moench, Kim-Wright); the raw spread does not isolate them.
• The same information as T10Y2Y. The 2-year Treasury yield embeds market expectations about Fed policy 0–24 months ahead, while the Fed Funds rate reflects current policy only. The two short anchors capture different things, especially when the market anticipates a near-term Fed pivot.
• A recession-prediction tool with quantitative precision. Yield-curve inversions have preceded every US recession since the 1960s, but the lag varies (6–24 months) and the depth-versus-duration trade-off is documented in academic studies. The raw spread does not produce a probability estimate; the NY Fed’s recession-probability model uses the 10Y–3M spread (T10Y3M), not this composite.
• Real-rate slope. This composite is the nominal slope. Both components include inflation expectations of different horizons, so a steepening or flattening can reflect inflation-expectation shifts rather than real growth or real policy changes.

Used responsibly, the series is most informative for cross-cycle historical comparisons over the full 1954–2026 window, where shorter series like T10Y2Y cannot be applied.

Historical Regimes

The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread has cycled through clearly identifiable regimes since 1954. The longer history allows for cross-cycle comparison that shorter spread series cannot support. How 2-year and 10-year compare maps the conditions under which one leads the other.

1954–1965 — Stable upward-sloping curve. The spread averaged approximately +1.0 percentage point under Bretton Woods, with shallow inversions in 1957, 1959, and 1960 — each preceding a recession by less than a year.

1966–1980 — Volatile slope under the Great Inflation. The spread oscillated sharply as the Fed raised and cut rates in response to accelerating inflation. Major inversions occurred in 1969, 1973, 1974, 1978, and 1979–1980, all preceding NBER-dated recessions.

1981–1989 — Volcker-era inversions and re-steepening. The most severe inversion of the modern era occurred in 1981, with the spread reaching nearly −5 percentage points as the Fed Funds rate climbed above 19% while the 10Y yield remained around 14%. The re-steepening through the mid-1980s coincided with disinflation and economic recovery.

1990–2007 — Two cycles of inversion. The spread inverted in 1989 (before the 1990–91 recession), again in 2000–2001 (before the dot-com recession), and a third time in 2006–2007 (before the Global Financial Crisis). Each inversion was followed by a recession within 12–18 months.

2008–2015 — Zero lower bound, structurally steep curve. With the Fed Funds rate pinned near zero and the 10Y yield above 1.5%, the spread remained positive throughout the entire post-crisis period — the longest non-inverted stretch in the dataset.

2016–2019 — Gradual flattening, brief inversion. The 2018–2019 Fed tightening cycle drove the spread to mild inversion in mid-2019, ahead of the brief pandemic-era recession that followed in early 2020.

2022–2024 — Deep inversion of the tightening cycle. The aggressive Fed tightening of 2022–2023 produced one of the deepest inversions on record, with the spread reaching the −3 percentage point range at the trough — comparable in depth to the 1981 episode. The re-steepening through 2024–2025 followed the start of the Fed cutting cycle. The current reading, relative to its full historical distribution since 1954, can be compared to the percentile and z-score shown in the key statistics block above.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

The 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread provides a direct read of the term premium plus rate-expectations component above the policy rate. Combined with the 10Y–2Y and 10Y–3M spreads, it completes the yield-curve-slope analysis across different anchors — each capturing a slightly different aspect of recession risk and rate expectations.

Related Research

This spread has inverted before every US recession since the 1960s. Its longer history (back to 1954) provides more inversion episodes than the 10Y–2Y spread (available only since 1976).

Macroeconomic Dataset Hub

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

Explore the Eco3min Dataset Hub

Sources

• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate (FRED series GS10)
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — Effective Federal Funds Rate (FRED series FEDFUNDS)

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). 10-Year Treasury Minus Fed Funds Spread — Monthly (1954–2026).<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/yield-curve-slope-10y-fed-funds-dataset/