We Tried to Rank CD Rates. The Numbers Do Not Exist Nationally

We keep a category page for every kind of deposit account we track, and the one for certificates of deposit had been sitting empty. The plan was straightforward: verify a CD rate at each of the ten banks in our lineup, publish the ranking, and move on. That is exactly the process behind every other figure on this site.

It did not survive contact with the banks' own pages. At Wells Fargo, the rate table for CDs carries a location stamp directly above it — “CA, 94105 Change Location” — and the rates underneath it are the rates for that ZIP code, not for the country. At Chase, the table does not appear at all until you supply a ZIP, and the page says so plainly: some products and features may be different depending on your location.

That is not a technicality we could round away. If we published “Wells Fargo pays 3.54% on an 11-month CD”, that sentence would be true in San Francisco and unverifiable everywhere else, and a reader in Ohio would be making a decision about their own money on a number that was never theirs.

There is a further wrinkle at Wells Fargo that a headline rate hides completely. Each special CD is published with two APYs: the standard one, and a higher “Relationship APY” available to customers who hold other qualifying accounts. On the 11-month special, that was 3.54% standard against 3.80% relationship on the day we checked.

Chase does the same thing from the other direction: its CD rate table is explicitly labelled as applying to customers with a linked Chase personal checking account, with non-relationship standard rates behind a separate link.

So the honest answer to “what does this bank pay on a CD?” at a branch bank is not one number. It is a number that depends on where you live and what else you already bank with them — and no ranking column can hold that.

Capital One publishes a straightforward national table for its 360 CD, with no minimum deposit and no ZIP gate. On 8/20/2026, the date Capital One itself puts on the figures, it read: 3.30% APY at six months, 3.75% at nine, 4.00% at twelve, 3.60% at eighteen, 3.50% from twenty-four through forty-eight months, and 3.60% at sixty.

Marcus by Goldman Sachs, the other online-first bank in our lineup, publishes national rates too — but its site blocks automated access, and it has done consistently since we first tried in early August. We will not fill that gap with a number copied from a comparison site, so Marcus stays unverified.

That leaves one bank in the lineup with a CD rate we can stand behind.

A ranking with one issuer in it is not a ranking. Nine rows of Capital One CDs at different terms, presented under a heading like “Best CD Accounts”, would promise a comparison and deliver a product page. That is the kind of page that exists to catch a search, not to answer a question.

So the category is gone. The row still appears on our accounts page with an honest note saying we have not verified a single CD and why, which is information rather than a gap. Every other link to it — the homepage, the search box, the sitemap — now disappears automatically whenever a category has nothing verified in it, so this cannot quietly happen again somewhere else.

There is also a modelling problem worth stating, because it is the real work behind any future CD ranking: our account model carries one APY field and no term. An APY without its term is meaningless on a CD. Publishing certificates properly means changing the data model first, not just loading numbers into it.

Online banks that publish national CD rates — the obvious names are Ally, Discover and Synchrony — are not in our lineup today. If they join it, the arithmetic changes: several issuers with comparable, nationally valid rates is a genuine ranking, and the page returns with real content behind it.

Until then, if you are shopping for a CD at one of the big branch banks, there is only one reliable move: get the rate for your own ZIP code, on the bank's own site, and ask whether the number you are being shown is the standard rate or the relationship one.