Why interest rates remain the same on fixed-interest loans

There is now a strong focus on fixed-interest loans, as she announced on Friday. Already 86 percent of all loans are fixed-interest loans. “In 2010 it was only 12 percent,” says Stiftinger. “Buying a property is the biggest investment decision, which is why many people rely heavily on security.”

And that costs. Typically, a higher premium has to be paid for fixed-interest loans with a term of usually 10 to 15 years, as the long-term predictability protects against negative surprises. In recent years, due to the special market situation, there has been an inverse interest rate trend, meaning that variable loans have been more expensive. This has also accelerated the trend towards fixed interest rates. Since the summer of last year, normality has returned to the realm of interest rates.

However, the interest rate cuts by the European Central Bank (ECB) have had significantly less impact on variable loans than on fixed interest rates. In the previous year, the average interest rate stagnated at 3.4 percent, while it fell from 4.14 to 3.2 percent for variable-interest loans. Stiftinger explains this with the banks’ assessment that the market will remain stable in the long term. In any case, the credit institutions would not make any money for themselves.

Overall, households with current housing loans were relieved in the previous year. They paid a total of 3.6 billion euros in interest, compared to 4.2 billion a year earlier.

Companies would also finance themselves more cheaply again, although they do this primarily on a variable basis (also due to often short-term loan terms), as Regina Fuchs, Director of the Statistics Department at the OeNB, notes.

Save

Interest rates on household savings also fell in 2025. At the end of 2025, there was an average of 1.62 percent for new fixed-term deposits, significantly less than a year earlier (2.43 percent). Deposits due on demand had an average interest rate of 0.69 percent. “A market comparison is definitely worthwhile, as the conditions sometimes differ greatly,” says Fuchs, referring to the transparency platform on the OeNB website.

The lower savings interest rates have also led to a change in saving behavior. While private households increased the volume of their savings accounts by a total of 37 billion euros in 2023 and 2024, in 2025 they hardly invested any more in new savings deposits (plus 2 billion euros) and again held increasing amounts of money in their current accounts (plus 8 billion euros). Overall, total deposits (accounts and savings) of domestic households rose from 299 to 331 billion euros.

According to Fuchs, investments in securities are becoming a strong focus. Households also invested around 7 billion euros (a total of 115 billion) in investment funds and 6 billion euros in bonds (a total of 42 billion).