How We Rank — RateRankings Methodology

Last updated: October 26, 2026

Our headline promise is "Ranked by rate. Not by who pays us." This page is the rulebook behind that promise, published so you can check our work.

The ranking rule

Every ranked table on RateRankings is sorted strictly by the advertised rate or APR, lowest first, using the figures lenders themselves publish for the product, amount, and term shown in the table.

When two offers show the same rate, ties are broken by total cost of credit on the stated example (for example, the same loan amount and term), then by lower required fees. Nothing else is a tiebreaker — not advertising, not affiliate payments, not how well we know the lender.

Every rate carries its receipts

Each rate on the site shows:

• Where it came from — the lender and the public source the figure was collected from.
• When it was pulled — the date the figure was collected and verified.

If we can't show you where a number came from and when, the number doesn't run.

Freshness: daily refresh, and stale rates come down

• Rates are collected and refreshed daily.
• A rate we can no longer verify as current is removed from the table — not greyed out, not footnoted, not left up "for reference." A smaller table of true numbers beats a bigger table of maybes.
• Dates on this site are real collection dates. They never auto-advance, and if we learn a rate has been withdrawn, it comes down as soon as we know, not at the next refresh.
• For credit cards, time-limited terms (introductory APR periods, balance-transfer windows, bonus deadlines) are checked against their advertised windows. An offer whose window has passed is removed even if the issuer's page is still reachable.

The 24-month archive

We keep copies of our published tables as they actually appeared, for at least 24 months. That archive is our substantiation file — if anyone, including a regulator, asks "what did you publish on that date, and why," we can show them. Rate history from the archive is also published as a feature, so readers can see how rates have moved over time.

Inclusion policy

• Any lender or card issuer with publicly advertised, generally available rates in a category we cover can be listed — banks, credit unions, and online lenders alike.
• Listing is free. No lender can pay for inclusion, better placement, fresher treatment, or a competitor's removal.
• We do not scrape or copy other comparison sites' tables. Our figures come from lenders' own public sources and official benchmark data.
• If a source stops us from collecting its data — a terms prohibition, a block, or a direct request — we stop collecting from it and mark it inactive. A lender can also ask us to correct or remove its listing at contact@raterankings.com.

What ranking does not mean

• A top-ranked rate is the lowest advertised figure we verified, not a recommendation and not a promise that you qualify for it. Your actual rate depends on your credit profile and the lender's underwriting.
• "Best" on this site always means "best by the stated rate rule above," applied to the lenders we cover. Our coverage is broad but not literally every lender in America, and we'll say so plainly.

Corrections

Found a wrong rate, or one we've missed? Email contact@raterankings.com. Wrong rates are corrected or removed promptly — accuracy is the product, and we'd rather hear it from you than leave it up.