A “for sale” sign is posted in front of a property on May 11, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
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Don’t wait for mortgage rates to come down later this year before locking in your loan, according to indications coming out the prediction markets.
After the 30-year fixed mortgage rate shot to the highest level since July 2025 on Tuesday, Kalshi traders became more confident rates will surpass 6.8% this year and perhaps even reach as high as 7%.
The 6.75% rate, reported by Mortgage News Daily, comes after the 30-year Treasury yield jumped to the highest since 2007 and the 10-year Treasury yield also threatened to break out to a multi-year high. The 10-year note is a key benchmark for mortgages.
Kalshi currently has multiple markets, which predict a numeric range for how high mortgage rates will be this year. On Tuesday, chances that rates will go above 6.8% went from 43% to 50% within a few hours. There was also a jump in odds that the mortgage rate will top 7% at some point this year. Traders gave it little chance of happening on Monday, but those odds jumped to 23% on Tuesday following the surge in market yields.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose by 33 basis points in the last 10 days and 46 basis points since April, when it was at 6.29%. Mortgage rates have been shaky since the Iran war, with rates going 6.64% in March but then tumbling down in April. A basis point equals 0.01%.
Though oil prices were steady on Tuesday after President Donald Trump said he would postpone a planned military strike on Iran, it is far from the level before the start of the war since February.
Amid the geopolitical unease, high oil prices impacted inflation reports last week, with consumer prices increasing by 3.8%, the highest since May 2023. Mortgage rates will likely remain high as inflation percolates.
Kalshi would resolve its markets based off of mortgage rates data from FreddieMac, which calculate weekly and tend to show lower rates than Mortgage News Daily.
To be sure, the higher rates haven’t dented buying enthusiasm quite yet. A Tuesday report from the National Association of Realtors also found sales of pending homes rose in April both month over month and compared to a year ago.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.
