Canada Key-Rate History and Change Explainer

Last verified policy rate: 2.25%

Bank of Canada target for the overnight rate, observed 2026-10-22. Source checked 2026-10-24.

Latest change in this history: -25 bp, announced 2025-10-29, effective 2025-10-30. A rate can stay unchanged for months; that effective date is not a fresh observation.

Official daily series used for this verification. This snapshot is not a live quote or a prediction.

No current-rate verification has been performed in your browser. Observation 2026-10-22; checked 2026-10-24. If either date is more than 7 days old, treat this snapshot as stale and check the official source. Without JavaScript, assess these dates manually.

Historical changes: 2023-07-13 through 2026-10-22

Change-only history, not every scheduled announcement. Holds are omitted; no values before the coverage start are implied. Preceding observation: 4.75% on 2023-07-12, used to calculate the first change.

Read a change without confusing the benchmarks

The Bank of Canada's policy rate is its target for overnight financing between financial institutions. It is not a consumer borrowing or savings rate. The Bank's explanation of the policy rate and operating band also distinguishes the target, Bank Rate and central-bank deposit rate. The Bank's deposit rate is not the rate on your personal savings account.

• Bank prime: a lender's reference rate used in many variable mortgages, HELOCs and lines of credit. Your contract may be prime minus a discount or plus a spread. Lenders set prime; this history does not contain prime quotes.
• Mortgage rate: your negotiated contract rate. Variable rates may track the lender's prime; new fixed quotes depend on bond yields, funding costs, competition and other factors. A fixed mortgage normally keeps its contracted rate until its term ends, regardless of a policy announcement.
• Savings and GIC rates: product-specific offers set by institutions. They can change by different amounts or on different dates. A fixed GIC already purchased does not automatically reprice when policy changes.

A cut from 4.25% to 3.75%, as recorded for October 2024, is minus 0.50 percentage points, or 50 basis points. It is not a 50% reduction in your loan rate. The announcement was October 23; the daily series first shows the new target on October 24. That effective date does not tell you when a lender changes your payment.

What to check after a change

A conditional dollar example

Suppose your own lender lowers your loan rate by 25 basis points and you hold a CAD 100,000 balance constant for a year. A simple interest-only approximation is 100,000 × 0.0025 = CAD 250 less annual interest. This is not an amortizing mortgage-payment calculation. If a CAD 25,000 savings balance separately loses the same 25 basis points for a full year, simple interest falls by CAD 62.50 before tax. Neither product change is implied by a Bank of Canada cut; these are explicit hypothetical product-rate changes with no compounding or balance movement.

Before changing your plan, write down the benchmark in your contract, the actual provider rate, its reset date and the amount of cash affected. A lower policy rate alone is not a reason to refinance, switch investments or assume that housing is affordable.

Sources, dates and freshness

Each row links to an official Bank of Canada announcement and a daily observation from Valet series V39079, Target for the overnight rate (business daily). Announcement dates describe the public decision; effective dates here are the first daily observations at the changed rate. Each row retains its own last-checked date; the latest source check is in the snapshot above. We compared consecutive observations to identify changes rather than treating every business day as a new decision.

The latest verification covers observations returned through the displayed observation date, even if the request's end date is later. Missing observations are not guessed, forward-filled or treated as evidence of a new decision. The historical table omits holds and does not attempt to cover the Bank's entire policy history. The prior observation linked above supplies the starting comparison.

The homepage already uses the same official series for its policy-rate card. It can show a newer observation because it requests live data separately; this page intentionally preserves a reviewed historical snapshot. Effective dates from years ago do not mean the rate is stale. The warning instead checks the latest observation date and source-check date against the browser's UTC date. More than seven calendar days for either date, or a future date relative to the device clock, triggers a warning while retaining the last verified value. Seven days is Wealthton's editorial freshness rule, not a Bank of Canada publication guarantee.

There is no background fetch, cron job, local-storage cache or automatic forecast on this page. Essential values and links are static HTML generated from one historical JSON dataset. JavaScript only updates the date warning. Cached pages may contain older snapshots: use the dates and official source links rather than assuming a refresh proves the rate is current.

Verifiable update procedure

This plain static/PHP hosting setup does not require a new server-side rate service. A maintainer checks official evidence, prepares a proposed local dataset and runs the existing-runtime maintenance script. No package installation or build pipeline is needed.

1. After a Bank decision, and at least weekly for freshness, inspect the official policy-rate page and announcements. Fetch recent daily V39079 observations; for a gap longer than that window, request the full date range since the last verified observation. Sort observations by date before comparing them; do not assume the API's array order.
2. Copy data/canada-policy-rate-history.json to a proposed file outside the public tree. Preserve every existing record, its original last-checked date and all provenance. For each new changed daily value, verify the associated announcement and append its announcement date, effective date, numeric percent rate, official announcement URL, dated observation URL and actual check date. Do not add a forecast or an unchanged-rate row.
3. Update the proposed file's verification object with the latest returned observation date and value, the actual check date and the exact official query URL. If the source cannot be verified, leave the dataset unchanged and let the stale warning persist. If there is no change, update only verification metadata; do not rewrite past rows.
4. Run node scripts/update-canada-key-rate-history.cjs --update /absolute/path/to/proposed.json. It rejects historical deletion, rewriting, backwards verification and contradictory dates, then writes the local dataset and regenerates only this page's marked data block. --check verifies dataset/page agreement without writing. --render repairs the generated block from the already-reviewed dataset; it is not a substitute for append-only updates.
5. Run node --test scripts/test-canada-key-rate-history-offline.cjs scripts/test-homepage-rate-sources-offline.cjs scripts/test-rate-display-offline.cjs scripts/test-site-integrity-offline.cjs scripts/test-ui-accessibility-offline.cjs, syntax-check the two new scripts, and review the source links and rendered mobile table. Update this page's sitemap last-modified date when publishing a reviewed change. Publish only through a separately authorized deployment process.

Automated checks cannot certify that a maintainer actually read the sources or that a historical gap contains every change. Review the whole official series over the gap and inspect the proposed diff. If an official historical correction is discovered, stop the routine append workflow and make an explicitly reviewed correction with updated evidence and tests; do not silently overwrite a past value.

Scope and disclosure

Educational context, not a borrowing quote, rate forecast, investment recommendation or personalized financial advice. Contract terms, taxes, qualification and your cash needs can change the right decision. See calculator methodology, editorial policy and disclosures. Report a data error.

For the broader transmission explanation, read How Key Rates Affect Mortgages, Savings, and Loans. This page adds the dated Canadian evidence rather than another generic rate calculator.