Sources
- Commercial bank lending & deposit rates — published monthly by the Central Bank of Kenya. These are weighted-average rates across each bank's loan and deposit book. Current snapshot: May 2025.
- Money Market Fund yields — sourced from the Vasili Africa Money Market Report and each fund manager's daily pricing. Current snapshot: Feb 2026.
- Central Bank Rate (CBR) — the benchmark rate set by CBK's Monetary Policy Committee. Currently 8.75% (Feb 2026).
MMF net yield
Fund managers quote a gross daily annualised yield. We subtract Kenya's 15% withholding tax to produce the net yield that actually lands in your account. Formula: net = gross × 0.85. Management fees are already baked into the gross number published by the managers.
Compound-interest projections
We use the standard compound-interest formula. Contributions are applied at month-end. Each monthly growth factor is computed as (1 + r/n)^(n/12) where r is the annual rate and n is the compounding frequency per year (daily, monthly, quarterly, annually).
Loan amortisation
All loan calculations assume a standard fixed-rate reducing-balance amortisation with equal monthly installments. The monthly payment is (P × r) / (1 - (1 + r)^-n) where P is the principal, r is the monthly rate (annual / 12), and n is the term in months. Each installment is split between interest (on the remaining balance) and principal.
Real Kenyan products add origination fees (1-3% of principal), credit life insurance, and 20% excise duty on interest. These aren't included in our base calculation. See the loan calculator for the optional fee toggle.
Freshness
Server renders are cached for 6 hours. A Vercel Cron hits /api/refresh daily at 04:00 UTC (07:00 EAT) to force-revalidate the rates tag. When configured with a live feed (via MMF_FEED_URL and BANK_FEED_URL), the dot in the header turns solid and we show "Live" instead of "Rates". Until then, the site serves the curated snapshot in kenya-rates.ts.
What we don't do
- Accept payment from banks or fund managers for placement.
- Add tracking links or affiliate redirects to any listed product.
- Publish forward-looking predictions. Everything shown here is from published CBK and fund-manager data.