Nearly every homebuyer in America paid more for their mortgage than they had to in 2025. And depending on the ZIP code, that overpayment ranges from an inconvenience to a six-figure mistake.
That’s the headline finding from a new Bankrate analysis of 3.2 million Home Mortgage Disclosure Act loan originations, which the company compared against binding competitive offers on its own mortgage marketplace across more than 350 metro areas.
The topline number: 87 percent of 2025 homebuyers did not secure the lowest rate available to them, and the typical borrower overpaid by roughly $3,343 a year, or an estimated $78,186 over the life of the loan.
The gap isn’t evenly distributed. Bankrate’s model, which controlled for 17 variables, including credit score, loan program, down payment size and even borrower demographics, found that the widest spreads were concentrated in a mix of unexpected small markets and familiar high-cost coastal metros.
Small markets, big spreads
Victoria, Texas, and Tyler, Texas, posted the two largest rate spreads in the country at 1.24 and 1.19 percentage points, respectively, above the most competitive offer available in each market. That gap translates into an average annual overpayment of $2,841 in Victoria and $3,361 in Tyler, or lifetime overpayments of $63,038 and $76,528.
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim ranked third, with a 1.18-point spread that compounds into a $149,073 lifetime overpayment given the market’s higher loan balances. It was by far the largest dollar figure on Bankrate’s top-10 list.
Santa Fe, New Mexico; Santa Rosa-Petaluma, California; Corvallis, Oregon; and Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California, rounded out a list otherwise dominated by high-cost Western metros, each with lifetime overpayments exceeding $100,000.
Elkhart-Goshen, Indiana, and La Crosse-Onalaska, straddling Wisconsin and Minnesota, were the outliers. They are smaller Midwest metros where rate spreads topped 1.14 points despite comparatively modest home prices, pushing lifetime overpayments above $61,000 anyway.
Even the ‘best’ markets still cost buyers thousands
The metros where borrowers came closest to the best available rate weren’t clustered in any single region, but they skewed toward the Midwest and Southeast.
Rocky Mount, North Carolina, had the smallest gap nationally at 0.65 percentage points. That was still enough to cost the average borrower there $2,108 a year. Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida, and three Iowa metros — Dubuque, Waterloo-Cedar Falls and Cedar Rapids — filled out the rest of the top five.
The takeaway, according to Bankrate, is that there is no market in the country where shopping around doesn’t pay off.
“Borrowers in nearly every corner of the country are overpaying for their mortgages, but exactly how much you overpay depends heavily on your ZIP code,” Alex Gailey, Bankrate’s Data Analyst, said in the report. “High-priced coastal metros see the steepest overpayments in total dollars. But it’s not just a big city problem. No matter where you live, you hold the leverage to stop overpaying by comparison shopping.”
A low-lift referral opportunity
For real estate agents working with buyers, the data adds a concrete number to a conversation that often stays abstract: the cost of not shopping lenders.
Bankrate’s recommendation to pull at least three quotes from different lenders on the same day is a low-lift referral opportunity for agents who want to position themselves as advocates beyond the transaction itself.
This is particularly true in markets like Victoria, Texas; Tyler, Texas; and the Santa Fe-to-Santa Cruz corridor of California and the Mountain West, where the report shows the stakes are highest.
The report also lands at a moment when rate shopping has become more visible to consumers thanks to online marketplaces and rate-comparison tools, which makes the persistence of an 87 percent overpayment rate notable. Access to comparison tools hasn’t obviously translated into comparison shopping.
Bankrate’s model draws on HMDA loan-level data, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, and loan-level disclosures from Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, layered against its own marketplace pricing.
That’s a wider data net than most single-source rate studies, but the benchmark itself is still Bankrate’s own, a detail worth flagging for readers before the six-figure lifetime numbers get repeated uncritically.
Still, the core finding tracks with what economists have said for years about mortgage shopping: Most borrowers get a single quote, often from whoever originated a prior loan or referred them, and never test that number against the market.
“The best thing you can do is break out of the single-quote loop,” Gailey said. “Instead of just checking with your bank or taking a quick recommendation, get multiple quotes from different lenders. Having that direct comparison is what will empower you to secure the best mortgage rate and could save you an average of over $3,300 a year, according to our research.”
