Corporate Borrowing Cost (ECB)
Retrieves the composite cost of borrowing for non-financial corporations the European Central Bank publishes monthly from 2003, for the euro area and every member: the average interest rate on new bank loans to companies across maturities and loan sizes. Euro area companies borrow mostly from banks rather than in the bond market, which makes this the broadest measure of their cost of credit, and the closest freely available proxy for euro area corporate credit conditions, since euro area corporate bond indices are licensed data.
No API key is needed. The rate is a decimal fraction (0.0377 for 3.77%).
See definition: https://data.ecb.europa.eu/data/datasets/MIR
Also known as: cost of borrowing for corporations, euro area lending rate, corporate credit cost.
Corporate Borrowing Cost (ECB) in Python
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_corporate_borrowing_cost as shown below.
from financetoolkit import FixedIncome
fixedincome = FixedIncome(start_date='2026-03-01', end_date='2026-08-31')
fixedincome.get_corporate_borrowing_cost(
countries=['Euro Area', 'Germany', 'France', 'Italy', 'Spain']
)
Which returns:
| Euro Area | Germany | France | Italy | Spain | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-03 | 0.0358 | 0.0381 | 0.035 | 0.0349 | 0.0328 |
| 2026-04 | 0.0362 | 0.0378 | 0.0353 | 0.0365 | 0.0345 |
| 2026-05 | 0.0363 | 0.0372 | 0.0352 | 0.0377 | 0.0351 |
| 2026-06 | 0.0379 | 0.04 | 0.0367 | 0.0377 | 0.0355 |
| 2026-07 | 0.038 | 0.0398 | 0.0363 | 0.0386 | 0.037 |
| 2026-08 | 0.0377 | 0.0388 | 0.037 | 0.0385 | 0.0363 |
Parameters
The function accepts the following parameters:
- countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include, e.g. ‘Euro Area’ or [‘Germany’, ‘Italy’]. Defaults to None, which returns all of them.
- rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
- growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False.
- lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the growth data by. Defaults to 1.
- 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.