A benchmark, not a price your bank sets
Euribor is the Euro Interbank Offered Rate: the interest rate at which banks in the euro area are prepared to lend money to each other, without collateral, for a fixed period. It is not set by any single bank, by a government or by the European Central Bank. It is a benchmark computed from what a panel of banks report, and it has been published since 1 January 1999, when the euro itself began.
For most people the word matters for one reason: it is the reference rate written into the majority of variable-rate mortgages in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Finland, the Netherlands and Austria, and into a smaller share of loans in Germany and France. If your loan contract says "Euribor plus" something, this is the number it is pointing at.
Who publishes it
The administrator of Euribor is the European Money Markets Institute (EMMI), a non-profit body based in Brussels. Euribor® is EMMI's registered trademark. EMMI collects contributions from a panel of around nineteen banks, applies its methodology and publishes the result. This site is not affiliated with EMMI and does not take its data from EMMI directly; every figure here is a republication of the Bank of Finland's daily series and the ECB Data Portal's monthly averages.
The five maturities
Euribor is not one number but five, each for a different lending term:
- 1 week
- 1 month
- 3 months
- 6 months
- 12 months
This set has been fixed since 1 November 2013. Before that date EMMI published fifteen maturities, including terms such as two weeks or nine months, which were withdrawn because too little lending happened at those tenors.
The five rates usually differ from one another because a longer loan carries more uncertainty. The 1-week and 1-month fixings sit very close to the rate the ECB pays banks on overnight deposits. The 12-month fixing embeds what the money market expects policy to look like over the coming year, so it tends to move earlier and further than the short end when expectations change. On 4 September 2026 the fixings ran from 2.154 % at one week to 3.108 % at twelve months; the shape of that curve, rising or falling with maturity, is itself informative.
How the rate is set: the hybrid methodology
Since 2019 Euribor has been calculated with a hybrid methodology. Where a panel bank has actually borrowed unsecured funds at a given maturity, its contribution is based on those real transactions. Where there were not enough eligible transactions on a given day, the methodology falls back on other market data under rules set by EMMI. The aim of the reform was to anchor the benchmark as far as possible in observable trades rather than in quotes.
EMMI then aggregates the contributions across the panel to produce the single published fixing for each maturity. The exact contribution of each bank is not published; only the final rate per maturity is.
The day-count convention: ACT/360
Euribor is quoted on an ACT/360 basis. Interest for a period is calculated as the principal multiplied by the rate, multiplied by the actual number of calendar days in the period, divided by 360. Because a calendar year has 365 or 366 days, a rate quoted as a percentage on ACT/360 produces slightly more interest over a full year than the headline figure suggests, by a factor of roughly 365/360, or about 1.4 per cent of the rate. Most mortgage contracts convert the reference to their own annual convention, so the effect on a household loan is usually handled by the bank rather than visible to you, but it explains why a bank statement and a back-of-the-envelope calculation can differ by a few cents.
Publication time and the 24-hour delay
EMMI publishes the fixings at approximately 11:00 CET on every TARGET2 business day, the calendar used by the euro-area payment system. TARGET2 is closed at weekends and on a handful of euro-area holidays, so there is no Euribor fixing on those days even if banks in your country are open.
Public sources are permitted to republish the fixings only after a 24-hour delay. That is why the newest fixing shown here, dated 4 September 2026, is normally yesterday's rather than today's. The delay is a licensing condition, not a data problem, and it applies to every free source of Euribor data.
Why Euribor drives variable mortgage rates
A bank that lends you money for twenty or thirty years has to fund that loan. Its cost of funding rises and falls with money-market rates, and Euribor is the most widely accepted measure of those rates in the euro area. Pricing a mortgage as Euribor plus a fixed spread lets the bank pass its funding cost through to you while keeping its own margin, the spread, constant.
The arithmetic is simple. Your interest rate for the coming period is the reference fixing, or the monthly average of it, plus the spread agreed in the contract. If the contract uses the 12-month rate and the fixing on 4 September 2026 was 3.108 %, the rate applied at a revision on that basis would be 3.108 % plus your spread.
Which maturity your loan uses depends mostly on where it was signed. Twelve-month Euribor dominates in Spain, Portugal and Finland, commonly on an annual or semi-annual revision. Italian variable mortgages commonly use the 3-month or 1-month rate. Dutch variable-rate mortgages commonly use the 1-month rate with a monthly reset, and variable loans in Germany and Austria commonly use the 3-month rate. France is the exception: variable-rate mortgages are less common there, and where they exist they usually reference the 3-month or 12-month rate, often with a cap.
What to check in your own contract
- Which maturity is the reference: 12 months, 3 months, 1 month or another.
- Whether the bank applies the daily fixing on a given date or the monthly average, and of which month.
- How often the rate is revised: monthly, quarterly, every six months or annually.
- The size of the spread, and whether any floor or cap applies to the reference or to the total rate.
Those four items, together with the outstanding balance and the remaining term, are all you need to reproduce your bank's calculation with the mortgage calculator on this site.