Data
The Hard Money Rate Index
What hard money loans actually close at, taken from securitized loan pools and industry research rather than from lender advertising. Updated quarterly.
Every rate page in this category, including ours, aggregates what lenders advertise. That is not the same as what closes, and there has never been a public benchmark of the second thing.
There is now, because the market got securitized. Fix-and-flip and bridge loans are packaged and sold as residential transition loans (RTL), and the rating agencies and researchers who cover those deals publish pool-level statistics: coupons, leverage, term, delinquency. That is a window onto tens of billions of dollars of real closed loans.
This page is that window, pointed at borrowers instead of at bond investors. Everything below is sourced and dated. Nothing on it is our estimate.
The headline: real rates are tighter than the advertised range
Lender marketing across this category spans roughly 8.0% to 15.0%. The loans that actually close and get securitized sit in a much narrower band.
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| RTL interest rates, recent quarters | 9.5% to 11.5%, averaging around 10.5% | Urban Institute (Apr 2026) |
| Median rate on new originations, Feb 2026 | below 10%, and still falling | LightningDocs.ai via Urban Institute |
| Premium over bank construction lending | about 200 basis points | Urban Institute (Apr 2026) |
| Bank single-family spec construction rate | around 8.0% | Urban Institute (Apr 2026) |
| What lenders advertise | 8.0% to 15.0% | Our own survey of lender pricing pages |
Leverage, from the same source
- Loan to as-is value (LTAIV)
- Usually no greater than 75% to 80%. Urban Institute (Apr 2026)
- Loan to cost (LTC)
- Acquisition cost plus renovation budget - up to 95% to 100% for renovation, typically slightly lower for ground-up construction. Urban Institute (Apr 2026)
- Speed
- Underwritten and funded in a week or less, against 45 to 60 days for conventional financing. This is what you are actually paying the premium for. Urban Institute (Apr 2026)
How big this market actually is
More than $85bn of residential transition loans were originated in 2025 Urban Institute (Apr 2026), split roughly:
| Segment | 2025 volume |
|---|---|
| Fix-and-flip renovation | more than $35bn |
| Ground-up construction | more than $25bn |
| Bridge-only | more than $25bn |
For scale: the entire banking sector held $91bn of single-family construction loans outstanding at the end of 2025. Private lenders wrote more ground-up construction volume in one year than banks had on their books. Urban Institute (Apr 2026)
Total private lending across all products was around $155bn in 2025, of which RTLs were about 54%. Forecasa via Urban Institute
Securitization volume, where our two sources disagree
We are going to show this disagreement rather than pick the number we like. Urban Institute and KBRA report materially different RTL securitization volumes, almost certainly because they are counting different things - rated versus all deals, or different definitions of what is an RTL.
| Year | Urban Institute | KBRA |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | — | $2.1bn |
| 2024 | $7bn | $6.2bn |
| 2025 | $8bn | $5.5bn |
| 2026 | — | $4.8bn |
What both agree on: the market grew fast from a standing start, rated deals are now the majority, and 2026 is expected to be flat to down. In 2025 there were 20 issuers, 10 of them new, and rated deals reached nearly two-thirds of the total. Urban Institute (Apr 2026)
How these loans perform
This is the number that sets your pricing, because it is what the lender's own capital provider is watching.
| Measure | Rated deals | Unrated deals |
|---|---|---|
| 60+ days delinquent, foreclosure, bankruptcy or REO (at 22 months) | 5.9% | 7.2% |
| Foreclosure, REO and bankruptcy alone | ~3.0% | ~3.0% |
| Cumulative net losses | below 0.1% | below 0.1% |
Read that carefully. Roughly one loan in seventeen in rated pools is seriously delinquent or worse at the 22-month mark, and about 3% reach foreclosure, REO or bankruptcy - yet lenders lose almost nothing, because the collateral covers them. That asymmetry is the entire product in one line: the lender is protected by your equity, so the deal going wrong is your problem, not theirs.
Bond spreads are not your interest rate
You will see RTL "spreads" quoted in the trade press. Those are what the securities pay investors, not what borrowers pay lenders. They are worth watching only as a leading indicator: when the bonds get cheaper to issue, borrower pricing tends to follow.
| Deal type | First-cash-flow spread | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Rated | 140–210 bps | ~165 bps |
| Unrated | 180–325 bps | ~226 bps |
RTL is still less than 5% of expected 2026 private-label RMBS issuance, so this is a small corner of a large market - which is why funding costs here move more than they do in mainstream mortgage.
Who is actually borrowing
More than 91% of borrowers transact only occasionally, but repeat borrowers account for over 40% of the $90.5bn in volume. Only 26% of occasional borrowers are still active a year later. Urban Institute (Apr 2026)
Methodology, and what this is not
- Figures are transcribed from the published sources listed below and are not our estimates. Each row on this page names its source.
- This measures securitized RTL loans and the segment of the market that research covers. Small local lenders who never sell a loan are underrepresented, and their pricing is typically higher.
- Rates shown are coupons, not all-in cost. Points, fees, minimum interest and the accrual basis sit on top - which is the whole argument of this site.
- Where sources disagree we show both rather than averaging them.
- Reviewed August 2026. Next scheduled review November 2026.
Sources
- Urban Institute, The Evolution of Residential Transition Lending (April 2026) — https://www.urban.org/research/publication/evolution-residential-transition-lending
- KBRA, Laying the Foundation: The Evolution of RTL Lending — https://www.kbra.com/publications/CfwBDnbf/kbra-releases-research-laying-the-foundation-the-evolution-of-rtl-lending
Please cite this
Questions people actually ask
What is the typical interest rate for a hard money loan?
Most quotes land in 10% to 12%, with fix-and-flip paper generally 9.0% to 14.0% and first-time borrowers or unusual collateral running up toward 18.0%. Ranges reflect pricing lenders and industry write-ups publicly advertised as of August 2026. They are advertised ranges, not transaction data - unlike conventional mortgages, private lending has no public loan-level dataset, so nobody can honestly claim to know the true national average. Treat them as a sanity check on a quote, not a benchmark you are entitled to.
But the interest rate is the least useful number on the term sheet. A loan at 10% with 3 points, a $1,495 doc fee, six months of guaranteed interest and interest charged on the undrawn rehab holdback is substantially more expensive than a loan at 12% without those terms. Compare all-in cost, never rates.
What's the typical interest on a hard money loan?
See above - 10% to 12% is the common band. The more useful question is what the loan costs in total dollars over the months you will actually hold it, which is what the true-cost calculator computes.
What do points mean on a hard money loan?
One point is one percent of the loan amount, charged up front. Two points on a $300,000 loan is $6,000, usually deducted from your proceeds at closing rather than billed.
The detail that costs people money: ask whether points are charged on the total loan facility or on the initial funding. If you are borrowing $240,000 for the purchase and $60,000 for rehab, two points on the $300,000 facility is $6,000 - but you only receive $240,000 at closing, so you paid 2.5% on the money you actually got. That gap is standard and rarely volunteered.
How much is 2 points on a $50,000 loan?
$1,000. Points are simply a percentage of the loan amount, so two points is 2% - and on a small loan the flat fees matter far more than the points. A $50,000 loan with 2 points ($1,000) plus a $1,495 doc fee and a $750 underwriting fee carries $3,245 of closing cost, which is 6.5% of the loan before a day of interest. Flat fees are why small hard money loans are disproportionately expensive.
What are the fees associated with hard money loans?
There are usually nine, and a term sheet typically leads with two. The full stack is origination points, underwriting or processing, document preparation, valuation, per-draw inspection, wire and servicing, extension, exit or back-end, and minimum or guaranteed interest. The fee stack, line by line walks through each one with the range you should expect and the question to ask about it.
How to calculate hard money loans?
Not the way most calculators do it. The typical online hard money calculator multiplies loan amount by rate by months and adds points. That undercounts real cost, often badly, because it ignores five things: interest charged on the undrawn rehab holdback, minimum-interest clauses, per-draw fees, extension fees on the months you run over, and the flat fees that dominate on smaller loans.
The honest calculation is: (all interest actually charged under the lender's accrual method) + (points on the basis the lender uses) + (every flat fee) + (draw fees x draws) + (exit fee) + (extension fees if you run long), then expressed as an annualised rate on the money you actually had use of. Ours does that: true-cost calculator.