Mortgage Rates Today, September 11, 2026: Consumer Price Index Due Today

The bigger picture

Mortgage rates climbed appreciably yesterday. There may have been multiple triggers, but MarketWatch said in particular that "traders grew increasingly anxious about rising oil prices and wholesale inflation data."

That inflation report, the producer price index (PPI), showed prices in the wholesale phase of the supply chain rising by 5.4% over the year ending Aug. 31 — much more than twice the Federal Reserve's 2% annual target.

If this morning's consumer price index (CPI) is anything like as bad, mortgage rates could surge again today. We must hope that markets got the worst of their inflation fears out of their systems yesterday.

Scroll on down for much more on the forces affecting mortgage rates today, including this morning's economic reports.

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What's coming up?

Although economic reports are usually the main drivers of changes to mortgage rates, they're not the only ones. The general mood in markets and economically consequential news can also affect those rates. News items concerning the war, employment, inflation, tariffs, and deficit funding are especially influential at the moment.

The Fed

The Federal Reserve's rate-setting body (the Federal Open Market Committee or FOMC) left general interest rates unchanged on Jul. 29, as many expected. However, most specialist investors now think a hike is likely at the next FOMC meeting on Sep. 16, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

The FedWatch tool yesterday soared to a 71.3% chance of a rate hike following the next FOMC meeting, way up from the 60.2% reading on Wednesday. Investors seem to believe that yesterday's scary PPI inflation data largely nixed lingering hopes that the Fed will hold general interest rates steady next Wednesday.

We think a small hike remains a sensible expectation for Sep. 16. The prolonged partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz has apparently fueled inflation. And the main tool the Fed uses to rein in inflation is rate hikes.

The FOMC doesn't directly set new fixed-rate mortgage rates. But the factors that influence its decisions (and to a lesser extent the decisions themselves) certainly do move those rates, usually in advance of Fed rate-change announcements.

The war and mortgage rates

For the first time in a month, the U.S. mounted airstrikes on Iranian military targets in the small hours of Aug. 31, and followed up with bigger attacks the following afternoon. Iran retaliated against both waves, and intermittent airstrikes have continued on both sides ever since.

Over the Labor Day weekend, both sides again escalated tensions, sending oil prices higher on most days since. Last night, the price of global benchmark Brent Crude was $109.29 a barrel, up from Wednesday's $101.75.

Peace talks with Iran and mediators had already stalled before recent escalations, and President Donald Trump had adopted a new strategy of economic warfare on Tehran. "Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. is launching a new campaign to isolate the Iranian regime, warning that countries and companies that do business with Tehran will face the wrath of the Trump administration," The Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 24. Some think that initiative has turned out to be a damp squib.

Iran is certainly in a weak position economically, and waiting for it to buckle may have been a smart way to resolve the conflict. However, markets remain anxious for a rapid reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Hopes for progress on renewed peace talks were dulled on Aug. 27, according to PBS: "'No negotiations are happening right now, and this will continue until the president feels that maybe they [Iranian officials] come to the table in a meaningful way,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told 'Fox & Friends' on Thursday."

The war, oil prices, inflation and markets

Mortgage rates respond to war news because a prolonged closure (or partial closure) of the Strait of Hormuz could again choke off 20% of the world's oil supply, putting additional pressure on gas, diesel, fertilizer and many other prices. It would take years to build the infrastructure necessary to bypass the Strait completely.

"An average of 10 commodity ships transited the Strait of Hormuz per day over the past 10 days, the lowest since ​May, according to shipping data on Monday, after U.S. and Iranian ‌strikes on tankers," reported Reuters on Sep. 7. "The 10-day moving average was 10 on Sunday, down from more than 15 on Friday and nearly 13 on Saturday, data from analytics firm Kpler found." Before the war began, such traffic averaged more than 100 ships daily.

Strategic petroleum reserves in the U.S. and elsewhere globally are now at multi-decade lows, meaning there's less room to cushion consumers from rising gas prices. It may not feel like it, but this method of suppressing pump prices has been in place almost since the start of the conflict. And some observers worry that it will grow increasingly difficult to access remaining inventory for technical extraction reasons.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says strategic petroleum reserve crude inventories fell to 286,684 million barrels for the week ending Aug. 28, marking the lowest level since 1983. The reserve stood at 415,064 million barrels before the Iran conflict began.

Meanwhile, many oil refineries in the Middle East and Russia are out of commission due to damage from the separate wars involving Iran and Ukraine. That began by sending oil prices lower on most days — though much less so recently. Still, why buy crude oil when you can't refine it?

Unfortunately, that has so far translated into gas prices that are significantly higher than a month ago, alongside record-high diesel prices. That's because a lack of refining capacity exacerbates rather than moderates supply issues for consumers and businesses, while demand remains fairly steady.

In his Substack post on Aug. 13, Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman backed up what we've been saying for some weeks. He referred to the "crack spread," which is the difference between the price of a barrel of crude oil and that for a barrel of "cracked" (aka refined) oil products, which he said had exploded by about $35 since the start of the Iran conflict.

"So while the price of a barrel of crude is up around $25, the price of the products refined from that barrel is up about 25+35=60 dollars per barrel," wrote Krugman.

Why? "The shortage of refining capacity has, in turn, held crude prices down: Buyers aren’t willing to pay extremely high prices for crude oil they can’t refine," continued Krugman. "Or to put it a different but equivalent way, the cutoff of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz in effect required a large rise in global oil prices to ration demand, but much of that rationing has taken place through a rise in the crack spread rather than a rise in crude oil prices."

Of course, any sudden good news from the Middle East could still send mortgage rates tumbling, regardless of that day's economic reports. Unfortunately, sudden bad news could — as we've seen in recent days — send them higher.

Why bond markets act differently from stock markets

Mortgage rates are largely dictated by the yields on a type of bond, the mortgage-backed security (MBS). So, we focus on bond markets.

On May 7, The New York Times explored why stock markets and bond markets have been behaving so differently from each other since the start of the conflict in the Middle East.

Investors in stocks have been wagering that U.S. companies will continue to generate large profits during the conflict. And the stock market typically cares only about whether dividends and company values will continue to rise.

"But the bond market is another matter," said The Times. "Bond traders have maintained a much sharper focus on risk. Yields remain correlated with shifts in the price of oil. As oil prices have spiked and inflation has risen, yields have risen and bond prices, which move in the opposite direction, have fallen."

More recently, bond yields (and mortgage rates) have risen on concerns about the level of government debt, too.

Mortgage rates today

There are two main economic reports on today's MarketWatch economic calendar. By far the more important is likely to be August's consumer price index (CPI). This may not be as accurate as the PCE price index, but it is more widely tracked by markets, and therefore has considerable potential to move mortgage rates.

MarketWatch publishes analysts' consensus forecasts for all four CPI headline numbers. Market expectations are based on those forecasts.

Two of the CPI's numbers report all the items in the index's survey, while the other two are "core" figures, which means they exclude prices for energy and food. Two of the numbers are for August only, and the other two are year-over-year (YOY) figures for the period Sep. 1, 2025-Aug. 31, 2026:

1. August CPI — Markets expect all items to have risen by an average of 0.4%, up from July's 0.1%
2. August core CPI — Markets expect core items to have risen by an average of 0.2%, the same as in July
3. YOY CPI — Markets expect all items to have risen by an average of 3.4% over the previous year, the same as in July
4. YOY core CPI — Markets expect core items to have risen by an average of 2.4% over the previous year, down from July's YOY reading of 2.5%

With inflation data, higher-than-expected numbers tend to be bad for mortgage rates, while lower-than-expected ones are usually good.

Today's other report is the preliminary September reading of the consumer sentiment index. Markets expect it to improve slightly, up to 51.4 from August's 51.0. However, it may well be overshadowed by the CPI.

Again, better-than-expected data tend to push mortgage rates higher, while worse-than-expected numbers usually drag those rates lower.

What's next?

No reports or events are on next Monday's economic calendar.

Next week's big event is the FOMC's rate announcement on Wednesday. We're also due retail sales data for August that day.

Other economic reports next week tend to have little or no impact on mortgage rates.