Following the dovish Reserve Bank OCR review on Wednesday (February 18) financial markets have reset their expectations of rate changes.
And this has triggered Westpac to cut long term fixed home loan rates.
The red bank has cut its three year rate by -16 basis points (bps) to 4.99%, its four year rate by -20 bps to 5.19%, and five year rate by -20 bps to 5.29%.
These changes become effective on Monday, February 23. And they come just after many banks raised longer rates over the past few weeks.
Westpac did not announce term deposit rates cuts at this time.
On February 13 at the end of this week, the five year swap rates was 3.70%. Today it is 3.48%. That is a -22 bps fall. For the three year swap rate, the change was from 3.37% to 3.15%, also a -22 bps fall. See the swap rat charts below.
Interestingly the one year swap rate has fallen -8 bps over the same period abut the two year by -19 bps. Perhaps that opens up the possibility of other banks moving on the two year fixed rate as well.
To compare mortgage rate offers in a way that includes the application and account fees costs (or break fee costs if you need to do that), and applying the impact of a cashback/legal fee reimbursement, or other incentive, you can use our home loan comparison calculator. You can find it here. Or, for convenience, we have added it to the bottom of this article.
Negotiate. How flexible banks may be will depend on the strength of your financials.
One other useful way to make sense of the changed home loan rates is to use our full-function mortgage calculator which is here.
And if you already have a fixed term mortgage that is not up for renewal at this time, our break fee calculator may help you assess your options. Break fees will be minimal in a rising market. But they become important in a falling market, like now.
Here is the snapshot of the lowest advertised fixed-term mortgage rates on offer from the key retail banks at the moment.
| Fixed, below 80% LVR | 6 mths | 1 yr | 18 mth | 2 yrs | 3 yrs | 4 yrs | 5 yrs |
| as at February 23, 2026 | % | % | % | % | % | % | % |
| ANZ | 4.49 | 4.49 | 4.69 | 4.89 | 5.19 | 5.89 | 5.99 |
 |
4.59 | 4.59 | 4.75 | 4.95 | 5.19 | 5.55 | 5.69 |
 |
4.49 | 4.49 | 4.64 | 4.69 | 5.09 | 5.55 | 5.69 |
 |
4.49 | 4.49 | 4.89 | 5.25 | 5.69 | 5.79 | |
 |
4.49 | 4.49 | 4.69 | 4.89 | 4.99 -0.16 |
5.19 -0.20 |
5.29 -0.20 |
| Bank of China | 4.38 | 4.48 | 4.48 | 4.58 | 4.88 | 5.28 | 5.28 |
| China Construction Bank | 4.79 | 4.49 | 4.49 | 4.54 | 4.90 | 5.10 | 5.20 |
| Co-operative Bank | 4.65 | 4.49 | 4.69 | 4.79 | 5.09 | 5.29 | 5.49 |
| ICBC | 4.69 | 4.39 | 4.49 | 4.59 | 4.99 | 5.09 | 5.19 |
 |
4.69 | 4.49 | 4.69 | 4.89 | 5.15 | 5.55 | 5.69 |
 |
4.59 | 4.39 | 4.75 | 4.89 | 5.15 | 5.55 | 5.69 |
Fixed mortgage rates
Select chart tabs
Daily swap rates
Select chart tabs
21 Comments
Their 2 year rate is 2.64% above the OCR. Either they are expecting some big OCR increases in the next 2 years, or that’s a bloody good margin.
For all who believe Tony Alexander is the messiah, take note.
Lol, how many people would really believe that.
There's a rotating cast of public talking heads that are just there to sell content.
There are many on here who think he's the man. Follow his guidance and you can't go wrong apparently
Averageman, Gecko, Kraken, where art thou ? The silence is deafening.
Relax little petal.
A slight dip down on rates, an overly dovish (Temporary) RB jawbone is to be expected,
No market moves in a straightline.
When inflation ticks higher again, the RBNZ will know their mistake amd correct hard.
Go to the money shops and load up on more DEBT SPECULATION.....you cannot lose.
Goooood luuuuck with that!
.
The louder the certainty the thinner the analysis usually is...
I think we are being played by the RBNZ and the big banks are joining in. With the massive outflow of skilled labor over the last two years wage inflation is going to emerge much faster than expected. In addition the low OCR will impact the value of the NZD and this risks importing price rises. Currently inflation is out of band and it's only coming back into band with a weak economy and rising unemployment. That is what the RBNZ have just told us.
It's the aging out of the skilled labour that's the problem, not the ones migrating.
And it'll get worse, youth unemployment is up pretty much everywhere. Although it seems like the way automation and AI are going, we won't need as much skilled labour.
Of course that depends on your definition of skilled.
Bipedal?
Literate?
Years and years of experience?
One interesting thing to note that most of the financial rewards for increasing productivity go to the capital owner, little of it is passed to workers.
Correct - the gap between productivity growth and wages used to correlate but that stopped in the 80's for most Western economies. Maybe that's because we imported 'productivity gains' = very cheap labor from China.
That'd be more impactful on inflation.
Fact is we have made labour an increasingly expensive liability for a company. While we have been removing trade barriers, we have been adding employee benefits and rules. So it's in a company's interests to go down paths of automation and outsourcing. With the automation, you end up with a handful of well paid engineers and managers, but most of the labour can be replaceable cannon fodder on just above minimum wage.
The US tech model. There's a line a teacher says to a father in the film Interstellar - "we don't need any more engineers and scientists we need farmers and your son is a great farmer." Doesn't matter how many data centers you build if you don't have food and water.
The tech sector is the apex because it's almost infinitely scalable for little extra cost.
But even for farming, this is now fairly industrialized, with expensive machinery replacing much human labour. So you have a few well paid jobs as machinery operators and repairers, and again, cannon fodder doing menial work that we haven't worked out how to mechanise cheaply yet.
Intelligence is now valued in tokens.
the price is falling.
as price falls demand will rise.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/ai-revolution-bernie-sa…
That's usually how technology works.
Although I don't know if demand will rise if the price falls in AIs current state, user usage looks to fall off fairly quickly after first usage. Like, 90%.
In unrelated news, Meta is turning off the Meta verse, after spending $70 billion on something no one asked for or wanted.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.