How banks priced deposits through the rate cycle
Deposit rates appear on only 31 recent papers, although the gap between policy rates and what banks paid savers was one of the largest transfers of the 2022–2024 tightening. How fast did deposit rates follow policy rates this time, and what made some banks pay more?
What prompted this#
Since October 2025, 31 papers carry a deposit-rate, deposit-pricing, bank-deposit or uninsured-deposit keyword (22 in finance journals, 8 in economics): "deposit interest rates" on 17, "bank deposits" on 8, "uninsured deposits" on 3. The quarter to September 2026 had 8 such papers against about 7 expected. Bank runs and deposit insurance draw far more attention than the everyday pricing of deposits.
Questions#
- How much of each policy-rate rise did banks pass on to savers (the deposit beta), and was it lower than in the 2004–2006 cycle, as the deposits channel predicts?
- Did online banks and money market funds force incumbents to pay more, and did the 2023 bank failures change that?
- Now that rates are falling, do banks cut deposit rates faster than they raised them?
Data that could help#
Branch- and product-level deposit rates (RateWatch or central bank statistics), bank balance sheets, money market fund flows and policy-rate paths.
Next step#
Estimate deposit betas by bank for the 2022–2024 rises and the following cuts, and relate them to local market concentration and the bank's share of online deposits.