Bank Rate held at 3.75%: your fix still costs £131 more a month

You watched the clock yesterday lunchtime, refreshed the news once the announcement was due, and felt a small flicker of relief when the headline said "hold." No change, you thought, nothing to do, the decision you'd been dreading has come and gone and your mortgage is safe for another six weeks. Then you went back to the comparison site to check your options for when your fix ends in the new year, and the number staring back at you was higher than the one you saw last month. The Bank did nothing. Your mortgage quote didn't get the memo.

Here's what actually happened: the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee voted 6-3 to hold Bank Rate at 3.75% on 17 September 2026, its sixth consecutive hold this year (Bank of England Monetary Policy Summary and Minutes, 17 September 2026). But the average two-year fixed mortgage rate has climbed to 5.73%, its highest since June and nearly a full percentage point above March's 4.84% (Moneyfactscompare, 15 September 2026), which is worth roughly £131 a month more on a typical £250,000 mortgage. A hold at the top table and a rise in what you're actually quoted are two entirely different things, and this month is the clearest proof of that gap the site has seen all year.

Why "held" didn't mean "nothing changed"

Fixed mortgage rates aren't priced off Bank Rate directly. Lenders price them against swap rates, the wholesale cost of borrowing over the life of the deal, and those move on where markets expect inflation and interest rates to sit in future, not on what the Bank has already decided. This month, a second wave of fixed-rate hikes from NatWest, Santander, HSBC, Lloyds Bank and TSB landed before the MPC even sat down, all reacting to worsening inflation news rather than the meeting itself (Moneyfactscompare, 15 September 2026). The Bank's own minutes confirm the scale of it: two-year fixed rates are now running roughly 95 basis points higher than before the current Middle East-linked energy shock began (Bank of England MPC minutes, 17 September 2026).

The driver is UK inflation, which rose to 3.1% in August, comfortably above the Bank's 2% target, with around 0.7 percentage points of that overshoot coming directly from energy prices as conflict in the Middle East pushed Brent crude and UK wholesale gas sharply higher through August and into September (Bank of England MPC minutes, 17 September 2026). Services inflation held at 3.4%, unchanged from July, which is the one figure giving the Committee's more cautious members room to argue the domestic picture hasn't turned properly hawkish yet.

So if you took yesterday's hold as a signal to relax about your remortgage, that's the wrong read: the market moved on this before the Bank sat down, and it's the market, not the Bank, that sets the rate you're actually offered.

What the vote itself tells you about November

The 6-3 split matters more than the headline number. Andrew Bailey, Sarah Breeden, Swati Dhingra, Clare Lombardelli, Dave Ramsden and Alan Taylor voted to hold, largely on the view that weak domestic demand and a soft labour market are still doing enough to contain the risk of an energy shock feeding into wages and prices more broadly. Megan Greene, Catherine Mann and Huw Pill voted for an immediate rise to 4%, the same three members and the same split as the previous meeting on 30 July (Bank of England MPC minutes, 17 September 2026). That's the hawkish minority's third consecutive meeting holding firm, and the Bank's own mechanical forecast now has inflation reaching roughly 3.75% in the final quarter of 2026 and slightly above 4% in early 2027, an outlook that's deteriorated noticeably since the July report.

Moneyfactscompare's own finance experts describe this month's repricing as a "second wave" of hikes, driven by inflation worries rather than the Bank's own decision (Rachel Springall, Moneyfactscompare, 15 September 2026).

Moneyfactscompare's own commentary goes further, flagging market speculation of a rise as soon as the next meeting on 5 November 2026, with talk of four further hikes through 2027 that would take Bank Rate from 3.75% to 5% by next July if the pattern holds. That's speculation, not a forecast anyone should bank on, but it's a genuinely different risk picture from the one this site described back in July, when a hold looked like the safer bet for longer.

The same meeting also agreed, unanimously this time, to wind down the Bank's remaining stock of government bonds bought under quantitative easing to zero, selling £20 billion a year on top of maturing bonds until the process finishes in 2034 (Bank of England Monetary Policy Summary and Minutes, 17 September 2026). That's a slower-burning story than Bank Rate itself, but it matters here because a larger, more predictable supply of gilts coming onto the market tends to push up longer-term borrowing costs, which is exactly the kind of pressure that keeps five-year swap rates, and therefore five-year fixed mortgage pricing, elevated even if the Bank never raises Bank Rate again this cycle.

So if your fix runs anywhere near the 5 November decision, that date now carries real weight: the committee that held this week is one member's mind away from a majority that wants to raise, not cut.

The maths: what this actually costs you

Take a £200,000 repayment mortgage over 25 years. Today's best-buy two-year fix, 4.70% at 60% loan-to-value (Halifax, HomeOwners Alliance, checked 18 September 2026), costs £1,134 a month. Accept the whole-market average instead, 5.73% (Moneyfactscompare, 15 September 2026), and you're paying £1,256 a month, £121 more for the same loan simply for not shopping around. Fall onto the average standard variable rate of 7.13% because your fix lapsed before you arranged anything, and the same loan costs £1,430 a month, £174 more than the average fix and £296 more than today's best buy. On a £300,000 mortgage the same three rates run to £1,702, £1,884 and £2,145 a month, gaps of £182 and £444 respectively (author's calculations, standard UK 25-year repayment formula).

The gap between the best buy and the average isn't small print, it's the difference between shopping the whole market through a broker and taking whatever your existing lender offers. If your credit history is anything less than pristine, the rate you're actually offered may sit closer to the average than the best buy regardless of how hard you shop, which makes checking your position early even more worthwhile.

So whichever loan size you're carrying, the practical gap between doing nothing and shopping properly is running into three figures a month right now, and it's larger than it's been at any point since June.

Why this is a different decision from the one we covered before the vote

A week before this decision, this site set out the case for reserving a rate ahead of the meeting, when the question was whether the Committee itself might tip the market further (see locking in before the 17 September decision). That case has now been overtaken by events: the vote landed as the hold everyone expected, but the mortgage market kept moving anyway, and the hawkish minority's forecast for inflation has actually worsened rather than eased. If you were waiting to see "which way the Bank goes" before acting, you now have your answer, and it wasn't the one that makes waiting longer look sensible.

The choice of fix length matters here too. With the average five-year fix at 5.78%, barely above the two-year average of 5.73% (Moneyfactscompare, 15 September 2026), the usual trade-off between paying a premium for longer certainty and betting on a near-term fall has narrowed sharply. Our two-year versus five-year fix breakdown covers the break-even maths in more detail, and it's worth revisiting now that the rate gap between the two terms has closed this much.

So if you're weighing term length alongside timing, the narrowing gap between two-year and five-year pricing is itself new information worth factoring in before you reserve anything.

What this means for you

Frankly, if your current fix ends within the next six months, the maths points toward reserving a rate now rather than waiting to see what November brings. Most lenders let you do this for free, and most will let you switch down to a cheaper rate if one appears before your new deal starts, so the only real risk in reserving early is a saving you might have to forgo, not a loss you'd have to absorb. Most people who run these numbers end up locking in something well before their fix expires, precisely because a hold at the top table has proved, again, that it says nothing reliable about where mortgage pricing goes next. If you're not due to remortgage for a year or more, there's less urgency today, but it's worth bookmarking 5 November regardless: our remortgage preparation guide sets out what to check on your loan-to-value band and paperwork well before that date arrives, so you're not starting from scratch if the Committee does tip toward a rise.