The Bahamas policy interest rate
The Discount Rate — the rate at which the Central Bank of The Bahamas lends to commercial banks — is the Bank's official policy interest rate under the Central Bank of The Bahamas Act. It is changed by the Board and used to signal the monetary policy stance; the Bank asks institutions to follow with a corresponding move in the Prime Rate. Changed rarely (three times since 2005), so a long update cycle.
| Current value | 4 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2016-12-22 |
| Official source | Central Bank of The Bahamas — Monthly Economic and Financial Developments (MEFD) May 2026, Selected International Statistics Table B 'Official Interest Rates — Selected Countries (%)', column 'CBOB Bank Rate': 4.00 for every month from May 2024 through May 2026; original change per CBOB 'Chronology of monetary policy & related developments' (December 2016 — Discount Rate reduced by 50 basis points to 4.00%, effective 22 December 2016) |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
THIS IS A REAL POLICY INSTRUMENT, NOT A DEAD RATE — do not assume the peg removes it. The Bahamian dollar has been pegged 1:1 to the US dollar since 1973, but The Bahamas RETAINS EXCHANGE CONTROLS on resident capital flows (the Central Bank administers Exchange Control, including approvals for residents' investments in foreign currency assets). That insulation is what lets the CBOB run a domestic interest rate that does not track the Federal Reserve: the Fed target fell from 5.25-5.50% to 3.50-3.75% between mid-2024 and December 2025 while the CBOB Bank Rate sat at 4.00% throughout. The Bank's own words (centralbankbahamas.com/monetary-policy and /objectives): the objective of monetary policy 'is to maintain stable credit and other conditions to support the fixed parity between the Bahamian and U.S. dollars', and the Bank 'has relied mainly on interest rate controls in combination with moral suasion and other policies to meet its monetary objectives'; the main instruments are reserve requirements, changes in the Bank Discount Rate and selective credit controls. The CBOB publishes its own Bank Rate alongside the ECB, Federal Reserve and Bank of England rates in every MEFD, which is the Bank treating it as the national policy rate. HELD AT 4.00% CONTINUOUSLY SINCE 22 DECEMBER 2016 — nearly ten years, so effective_from is genuinely 2016, not a stale scrape. There is no scheduled MPC calendar and no rate-decision communiqué series; changes are announced by ad hoc press release, and the monthly MEFD is the reliable place to detect one. DO NOT substitute the Prime Rate (4.25% since 5 January 2017, set by the commercial banks, not the Central Bank) or the weighted average loan rate (9.04% in May 2026) — neither is the policy instrument. ACCESS: centralbankbahamas.com serves fine to scripted fetchers, but the MEFD PDFs do not yield text to naive HTML converters (they need a real PDF text extractor); the /chronology page stops at December 2016 and is not a reliable staleness signal.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2005-02-01 | 5.25 | Central Bank of The Bahamas — 'Chronology of the monetary po |
| 2011-06-06 | 4.5 | Central Bank of The Bahamas — press release 'Reduction in th |
Get it programmatically
curl https://usaref.dev/v1/bs/policy-rate
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://usaref.dev/v1/bs/policy-rate/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://usaref.dev/provenance/bs/policy-rateOther The Bahamas series: VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates