Short-term interest rates are the rates at which short-term borrowings are effected between financial institutions or the rate at which short-term government paper is issued or traded in the market. Short-term interest rates are generally averages of daily rates, measured as a percentage.

Short-term interest rates are based on three-month money market rates where available. Typical standardised names are “money market rate” and “treasury bill rate”. The OECD source specifically returns the 3-month interbank offered rate.

See definition: https://data.oecd.org/interest/short-term-interest-rates.htm

It is also possible to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB) by setting the gmdb_source to True.

Both sources return the rate as a decimal fraction per annum (0.0513 for 5.13%), so the two are directly interchangeable. Only the OECD source supports monthly and quarterly frequency; the GMDB is annual only, so the period argument has no effect when gmdb_source is True.

Changed in v2.2.0: the GMDB source previously returned percentage points (5.13 for 5.13%) while the OECD source returned a decimal fraction. The GMDB series is now divided by 100 so both sources agree; divide any hard-coded comparison by 100.

Also known as: 3-month rate, money market rate, short-term yield.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Short Term Interest Rate for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Short Term Interest Rate in Python

The Short Term Interest Rate is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_short_term_interest_rate as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2023-05-01')

economics.get_short_term_interest_rate(
    countries=['Japan', 'United States', 'China'],
    gmdb_source=False,
    period='quarterly'
)

Which returns:

  Japan United States China
2023Q2 -0.0001 0.0513 0.0289
2023Q3 0.0001 0.0543 0.0261
2023Q4 0.0002 0.054 0.0288
2024Q1 0.0005 0.0526 0.0267
2024Q2 0.0013 0.0531 0.0235
2024Q3 0.0023 0.051 0.021
2024Q4 0.0033 0.0454 0.0205
2025Q1 0.0079 0.0432 0.0202
2025Q2 0.0078 0.0431 0.0188
2025Q3 0.0079 0.042 0.0171
2025Q4 0.009 0.0386 0.0168
2026Q1 0.012 0.0366 0.0172
2026Q2 nan 0.0375 nan

Parameters

get_short_term_interest_rate accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
  • period (str | None, optional): Whether to return the monthly, quarterly or the annual data.
  • gmdb_source (bool | None, optional): Whether to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB).
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Money Supply Central Bank Policy Rate Long Term Interest Rate Real Interest Rate Yield Curve Slope Real Yield Curve (TIPS) Breakeven Inflation Expectations 30-Year Mortgage Rate

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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