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Softening home prices... but home affordability shrank again? See the income needed to buy a home in the top 50 metro areas to find out what's going on.

Softening home prices... but home affordability shrank again? See the income needed to buy a home in the top 50 metro areas to find out what's going on.

ARM Indexes: MTA - Moving Treasury Average, aka 12-MAT

MTA (aka 12-MAT) is an index used to govern changes in certain Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), notably Option and FlexPay-style ARMs which feature monthly adjustment periods. MTA stands for "Moving Treasury Average".

The MTA, sometimes called MAT or 12-MAT, is a "derived" ARM index. It is produced by adding together other published index values and dividing the sum by the number of entries to produce a final single value.

To produce the monthly value for the MAT, a lender will add the last twelve monthly values of the one-year US Treasury Constant Maturity (not Treasury "bill") and divide the total by 12 (entries). The result is the new index value.

To that value, the lender will add a markup, called a "margin", and the sum of the two becomes your loan's new interest rate. For Option and FlexPay ARMs, the margin is typically 250 basis points (2.5%). Different lenders may use larger or smaller margins.

Since a "moving average" series could use any number of Treasury values, some lenders identify the MTA as 12-MAT (their own shorthand for 12-month moving average of the one-year Treasury).

Because it is a moving average, the MTA isn't as volatile as the index it is derived from (see this chart for a graphic demonstration). This can work to your advantage when interest rates are rising, but when rates are falling, the moving average will prevent your mortgage rate from falling rapidly.

Indexes comparable to the MTA include the 11th District Cost of Funds (COFI) and COSI, the cost-of-savings index produced by Wells Fargo Bank, the successor to an earlier index produced by Wachovia and Golden West Financial (World Savings).

L O A D I N G

ARM Indexes: MTA - Moving Treasury Average, aka 12-MAT from February 2022 to February 2023

Date MTA - Moving Treasury Average, aka 12-MAT
Feb-2023 3.46583
Jan-2023 3.13833
Dec-2022 2.79333
Nov-2022 2.42833
Oct-2022 2.04917
Sep-2022 1.68917
Aug-2022 1.37167
Jul-2022 1.10417
Jun-2022 0.85917
May-2022 0.64417
Apr-2022 0.47667
Mar-2022 0.32417
Feb-2022 0.21917

3-Month TCM
6-Month TCM
1-Year TCM

More ARM Indexes & Info

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