What is SOFR?
The Secured Overnight Financing Rate is the median price of overnight cash borrowed against U.S. Treasury collateral. The latest print is 3.87% for October 8, 2026, on $2,963 billion of transactions.
SOFR, the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, is a daily interest rate published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that measures what it costs to borrow cash overnight when the loan is secured by U.S. Treasury securities. In the New York Fed's own words, it is "a broad measure of the cost of borrowing cash overnight collateralized by Treasury securities." It is built from actual repurchase agreement (repo) trades, not from bank estimates, and it is the rate that replaced U.S. dollar LIBOR in new derivatives, floating-rate notes and loans, and in the fallback language of legacy contracts.
Each print is a single percentage for one business day. It is backward-looking by construction: the rate for a given day is published the next morning, once the trades have happened.
The current SOFR snapshot
On a percentile-rank basis, the latest print sits at 65 out of 100 against every daily SOFR value since the first effective date, April 2, 2018. The five most recent observations, with the distribution of trade rates behind each one, are below.
| Effective date | SOFR | Change (bp) | 1st pct | 25th pct | 75th pct | 99th pct | Volume ($bn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 8, 2026 | 3.87% | -1 | 3.83% | 3.85% | 3.91% | 3.95% | 2,963 |
| Oct 7, 2026 | 3.88% | -2 | 3.81% | 3.86% | 3.92% | 3.96% | 2,968 |
| Oct 6, 2026 | 3.90% | +1 | 3.84% | 3.88% | 3.95% | 3.98% | 2,997 |
| Oct 5, 2026 | 3.89% | +1 | 3.84% | 3.87% | 3.94% | 3.97% | 3,007 |
| Oct 2, 2026 | 3.88% | +1 | 3.83% | 3.86% | 3.93% | 3.96% | 3,013 |
SOFR over the past year
Over the twelve months to October 8, 2026, SOFR ranged from a high of 4.31% on October 28, 2025 to a low of 3.50% on May 20, 2026. The step changes in the chart line up with moves in the federal funds target range: the range moved down 25 bp to 3.75%–4.00% from October 30, 2025, down another 25 bp to 3.50%–3.75% from December 11, 2025, and up 25 bp to 3.75%–4.00% from September 17, 2026 (dates are the first EFFR effective date in each range). SOFR printed 3.62% on September 16, 2026 and 3.85% the next day. The full record is on the SOFR history pages and the target range history.
Who publishes SOFR
The New York Fed is the rate's administrator. It publishes SOFR together with two narrower Treasury repo rates, the Tri-Party General Collateral Rate (TGCR) and the Broad General Collateral Rate (BGCR), "in cooperation with the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Financial Research (OFR)." The transaction data are collected under the supervisory authority of the Federal Reserve Board and the authority of the OFR.
Publication started on April 3, 2018, and the first value date is April 2, 2018. That first SOFR was 1.80% on $849 billion of volume. The rate now appears on the New York Fed's SOFR page at approximately 8:00 a.m. ET each business day. If a same-day check finds the rate should change by more than one basis point, the New York Fed revises it at about 2:30 p.m. ET that day, and only that day. No rate is published on or for days that SIFMA recommends as a full close for U.S. government securities trading.
The SOFR "for" October 8, 2026 is the rate on trades negotiated on October 8, published on the morning of October 9. Contracts reference the effective (value) date. Mixing the two shifts every rate in a calculation by one business day, and can cause small reconciliation breaks between a lender's statement and a borrower's own model.
Which transactions are in it
SOFR is the widest of the three repo rates, and each one nests inside the next:
| Rate | Transactions included | Latest rate |
|---|---|---|
| TGCR | Overnight tri-party general collateral repo on Treasuries, centrally cleared or not, excluding trades with the Federal Reserve | 3.85% |
| BGCR | Everything in TGCR plus GCF Repo trades | 3.85% |
| SOFR | Everything in BGCR plus bilateral Treasury repo cleared through FICC's Delivery-versus-Payment (DVP) service | 3.87% |
Some trades are deliberately left out. Trades between affiliated entities are excluded where the data allow, as are trades negotiated for forward settlement. "Open" repos whose pricing resets daily are included to the extent possible. In the DVP segment, the lowest-rate 20% of volume is trimmed each day before the median is taken. That trim targets "specials": repos where the cash lender accepts a below-market rate to obtain one particular Treasury issue. Specials say more about demand for a security than about the cost of cash, so leaving them in would pull the rate down. The New York Fed notes that the trim removes "some (but not all)" of them.
The rate itself is a volume-weighted median: sort the day's trades from lowest to highest rate, add up the dollars, and take the rate at which the cumulative total passes half. It is rounded to the nearest basis point and published alongside the 1st, 25th, 75th and 99th volume-weighted percentile rates. The step-by-step mechanics, with the New York Fed's own numerical example, are in how SOFR is calculated.
Why the market trusts it: volume and design
When the Alternative Reference Rates Committee (ARRC) picked "a broad Treasuries repo financing rate" as its preferred alternative to USD LIBOR on June 22, 2017, its stated criteria included the depth of the underlying market and how likely that depth was to last, the rate's usefulness to market participants, and whether its construction, governance and accountability were consistent with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks. Eight years of data show how the first criterion has played out.
The transaction base has nearly quadrupled
| Year | Observations | Average daily volume ($bn) | Highest daily volume ($bn) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 188 | 805.6 | 1,000 |
| 2019 | 250 | 1,056.2 | 1,281 |
| 2020 | 251 | 1,033.3 | 1,358 |
| 2021 | 250 | 906.0 | 1,088 |
| 2022 | 249 | 967.9 | 1,174 |
| 2023 | 249 | 1,409.9 | 1,850 |
| 2024 | 250 | 2,006.9 | 2,523 |
| 2025 | 249 | 2,756.8 | 3,485 |
| 2026 | 193 | 3,099.6 | 3,508 |
Average daily volume rose from $805.6 billion in 2018 to $3,099.6 billion in 2026 so far, a factor of about 3.8. The largest single day on record is $3,508 billion on January 2, 2026. The latest print rests on $2,963 billion. For scale, the effective federal funds rate (EFFR), the main unsecured overnight benchmark, has averaged about $105 billion a day in 2026, so SOFR's daily transaction base is roughly 30 times larger. Daily figures and the percentile spread behind each print are on the percentiles and volume page.
Governance around the number
Volume matters because a median of trillions of dollars of trades is hard for any single participant to move. The process around it is also documented. The New York Fed's Audit Group assesses the production of SOFR, TGCR, BGCR, EFFR and OBFR against the IOSCO Principles annually, and an internal Oversight Committee that includes OFR members reviews rate production. If one segment's data are missing, the New York Fed uses that segment's most recent data adjusted for the change in primary dealers' repo borrowing rates, and does not publish the percentile statistics that day. Complaints about a given day's rate go in writing to the New York Fed.
A transaction-based overnight rate reports stress rather than smoothing it. SOFR jumped 282 bp to 5.25% on September 17, 2019 and fell 270 bp the next day, and it moves on many month-ends and quarter-ends. Anyone budgeting off daily SOFR should expect those prints. The SOFR spikes and month-end guide walks through the episodes.
How SOFR is used
Most products apply overnight SOFR across an interest period, compounding it or summing simple daily interest, or use a published average or term rate derived from it.
Derivatives
The derivatives market built out first. CME launched 1-month and 3-month SOFR futures on May 7, 2018, LCH cleared its first SOFR swap on July 18, 2018, and on October 16, 2020 CME and LCH switched discounting and price alignment from EFFR to SOFR. A standard SOFR overnight index swap exchanges a fixed rate for daily SOFR compounded over each period, typically paid two days after the period ends.
Floating-rate notes
The ARRC recommends overnight SOFR and the SOFR Averages for FRNs. Notes compound daily SOFR in arrears with a short lookback, usually 2–3 business days, so the coupon is known shortly before payment. The New York Fed's SOFR Index, published since March 2, 2020, lets issuers and investors compute compounded SOFR between any two dates from two index values instead of every daily rate in the period. The SOFR Index calculator does that division for you.
Loans
Business loans use either daily SOFR in arrears, where the ARRC's conventions contemplate a 5-business-day lookback, or forward-looking CME Term SOFR, which the ARRC formally recommended on July 29, 2021 and whose recommended scope includes new business loans. Term SOFR is a separate CME Group benchmark that requires a license, explained in Term SOFR vs overnight SOFR. For consumer products such as adjustable-rate mortgages and student loans, the ARRC recommends overnight SOFR or the SOFR Averages.
SOFR for October 8, 2026 was 3.87%. On $100 million, one day of interest on an actual/360 basis, the convention the New York Fed uses for the SOFR Averages, is:
$100,000,000 × 3.87% × 1/360 = $10,750.00
A loan would add its margin on top and, over a period, compound or sum each day's figure according to its conventions. The SOFR interest calculator and compounded SOFR calculator run the full period with real daily prints.
Fallbacks for legacy LIBOR contracts
SOFR is also what many old contracts now pay. ISDA's IBOR Fallbacks Supplement and Protocol, effective January 25, 2021, replace USD LIBOR in derivatives with compounded SOFR in arrears (with a two-day backward shift) plus a fixed spread adjustment. For contracts that had no workable fallback, the Adjustable Interest Rate (LIBOR) Act of March 15, 2022 and the Federal Reserve Board's Regulation ZZ set the replacement by law: in most non-consumer cash contracts, overnight LIBOR becomes SOFR + 0.00644% and 1-, 3-, 6- or 12-month LIBOR moves to the matching CME Term SOFR tenor plus that tenor's spread. The LIBOR fallback calculator applies these rules.
How SOFR differs from LIBOR
LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, was set for seven U.S. dollar tenors from overnight to 12 months, so a loan could fix its rate for the coming three months on day one. SOFR has one tenor, overnight, and it describes yesterday's trades rather than the next period.
| SOFR | USD LIBOR | |
|---|---|---|
| Collateral | Secured by Treasury securities | An interbank offered rate, with no Treasury collateral behind it |
| Tenors | Overnight only; term rates are derived | Overnight, 1 week, 1, 2, 3, 6 and 12 months |
| Timing | Observed after the fact, applied in arrears | Known at the start of the interest period |
| Basis | Volume-weighted median of actual trades | Settings produced from a bank panel by ICE Benchmark Administration |
| Status | Published daily since April 2018 | All USD panel settings ceased June 30, 2023; synthetic 1-, 3- and 6-month settings ended September 30, 2024 |
LIBOR settings generally sat above compounded SOFR, and the gap widened with tenor. The fixed ISDA spread adjustments quantify it: the five-year median difference between each LIBOR tenor and compounded SOFR, fixed on March 5, 2021, rises from 0.644 bp overnight to 11.448 bp at 1 month, 26.161 bp at 3 months and 71.513 bp at 12 months. That is why a legacy 3-month LIBOR loan that falls back to SOFR adds roughly 26 bp to stay economically close to where it started. The credit spread adjustment guide covers how those values were set, and secured vs unsecured rates explains what the day-to-day gap between SOFR and EFFR tells you.
The timing difference has the larger practical effect. A LIBOR borrower knew its coupon months ahead. A borrower on SOFR in arrears learns its final rate a few days before payment, which is why conventions such as lookbacks, observation shifts and payment delays exist. The compounding in arrears conventions article works through each one with numbers, and the LIBOR to SOFR transition timeline covers the dates that got the market here.