United States Federal post-judgment interest rate (28 U.S.C. § 1961)

What this value means

SCOPE — this is the FEDERAL POST-JUDGMENT rate only. It attaches to a money judgment in a United States district court from the date the judgment is entered (28 U.S.C. § 1961(a)); it is not a late-payment rate on invoices and it does not apply of right to an unpaid contractual debt before judgment. WEEKLY MOVING FIGURE: the rate is not a fixed statutory percentage. It is the weekly average 1-year constant maturity Treasury yield published by the Federal Reserve in statistical release H.15, taken for the calendar week PRECEDING the date the judgment is entered — so the applicable rate is fixed once, at entry, by the week that came before, and every judgment week can carry a different number. Recent published weekly averages: week ending 10 July 2026 4.03%; 17 July 4.02%; 24 July 4.10%; 31 July 4.08%. The 4.08% figure served here is the week ending 31 July 2026 and governs judgments entered 3-9 August 2026. NEXT FIXING: the weekly average for the week ending 7 August 2026 appears in the H.15 release published Monday 10 August 2026 at 4:15 pm ET and governs judgments entered 10-16 August 2026; a new figure follows every Monday. COMPOUNDING: annually, computed daily (§ 1961(b)) — unlike most statutory-interest regimes, which are simple. STATE RATES DIFFER AND ARE NOT THIS NUMBER: every state fixes its own judgment rate and its own general 'legal rate' by state statute, and the spread is wide — several states run fixed rates around 8-12% per annum, others peg to a Treasury or prime-linked formula reset annually or quarterly, and a few sit near 2%. A judgment in state court, or a state-law claim, takes the state's rate, not § 1961. There is no federal pre-emption and no national average; anyone needing a state number must read that state's statute. PRE-JUDGMENT INTEREST: in federal-question cases it is discretionary with the court (no general federal statute fixes a pre-judgment rate); in diversity cases it is governed by state law. CARVE-OUTS inside § 1961 itself: internal revenue tax cases take the § 6621 IRC underpayment/overpayment rate instead (§ 1961(c)(1)); Court of Federal Claims judgments are governed by § 1961(c)(3) and other provisions; criminal judgments use the same Treasury measure through 18 U.S.C. § 3612(f)(2) and condemnation deficiency judgments through 40 U.S.C. § 3116. RETRIEVAL TRAP: the H.15 page at federalreserve.gov shows DAILY yields on its landing view — the daily value for the Friday is not the weekly average and must not be substituted for it; the weekly average is a business-day mean of the whole week. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts does not itself publish a rate table (its page points to H.15); individual district and bankruptcy courts publish convenience tables of the weekly figures, which carry disclaimers that H.15 and the statute control.

Get it programmatically

curl https://usaref.dev/v1/us/statutory-interest
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://usaref.dev/v1/us/statutory-interest/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://usaref.dev/provenance/us/statutory-interest

Other United States series: Federal funds target range (upper bound) · Value added tax · VAT registration threshold · State general sales tax rate · Federal minimum wage (FLSA) · Federal public holidays 2026 · Consumer Price Index (CPI-U), 12-month change · Federal corporate income tax rate · Withholding tax rates · Federal individual income tax brackets (single filer, tax year 2026) · Statutory social-insurance contributions

The same figure elsewhere: Canada · Costa Rica · Dominican Republic · El Salvador · Guatemala · all 10