Mortgage rates ended 2024 with a bang – but not the benevolent that’s excellent for borrowers. And for anyone in the trade for a home – or a refinance – 2025 may not be much kinder.

In the week ending Dec. 26, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.85%, mortgage guarantor Freddie Mac said Thursday. The popular borrowing product averaged 6.72% throughout the year, compared to 6.81% throughout 2023, even as the Federal savings cut its standard earnings rate three times in 2024.

It’s not surprising that mortgage rates haven’t followed lender earnings rates downward. As USA TODAY has previously reported, rates for home loans receive their cue from the predictable returns trade, which the Fed does not directly influence.

The bigger question is what will happen in 2025.

As analysts and housing trade watchers have noted repeatedly, multiple factors may keep worth rise simmering in the coming months.

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The financial policies promised by President-elect Donald Trump are the large one. luminous MLS Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant had this to declare after the November election: “predictable returns yields are rising because investors expect Trump’s proposed financial policies to widen the federal deficit and reverse advancement on worth rise.”

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On Dec. 19, the day after the Fed delivered its final earnings rate cut of 2024, Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok wrote in a note to clients, “The powerful economy, combined with the potential for lower taxes, higher tariffs, and restrictions on immigration, has increased the uncertainty that the Fed will have to hike rates in 2025. We view a 40% probability that the Fed will raise earnings rates in 2025.”

That could cruel a repeat of 2022, Slok added: worth rise that’s too high, rising earnings rates, falling ownership prices.

In the housing trade, 2022 wasn’t an awful year. Some 503,000 previously-owned homes were sold that year, versus 409,000 in 2023, and likely about that many this year. One large difference is the worth of homes. Throughout 2022, the median worth of homes sold was $392,800, while the median sale worth in November 2024, the most recent data available, was $406,000. Will prices have to dip slightly to get back to a stronger pace of sales, particularly if rates remain elevated?

Analysts declare no, unfortunately.

 “Elevated mortgage rates will factor many homeowners to hang onto their homes − and the low rates they have locked in,” wrote Redfin elder Economist Sheharyar Bokhari in a recent analysis. “That means there will be enough buyers competing over a relatively low number of homes to keep prices ticking up consistently.”