Key takeaways
- Bank Rate has been 3.75% since 18 December 2025. The committee held it there at all six of its 2026 meetings, most recently on 17 September by a majority of 6 to 3.
- On 24 September 2026 the Bank of England's own swap curve priced about 0.19 percentage points into the 5 November decision, roughly three quarters of a 0.25 point step.
- A 0.25 point rise adds £20.10 a month to a £150,000 tracker, £33.51 to a £250,000 one and £46.91 to a £350,000 one, on a 20 year term at 4.23%.
- Your payment rises by less than your interest does. On £150,000 the first month's interest goes up £31.25 while the payment goes up £20.10, so £11.15 less capital comes off.
- 90.6% of new mortgage lending in 2026 Q2 was fixed, so most borrowers meet a November change only when their current deal runs out.
Will interest rates go up in November 2026? Nobody can tell you, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing. What can be pinned down is what the Bank of England has actually said, and what price the market was putting on a rise. On 24 September 2026 the Bank's own overnight index swap curve, which is estimated from swap rates settling on SONIA, the sterling overnight rate, priced roughly three quarters of a 0.25 point increase into the 5 November decision. That's a market view, not a forecast, and the Bank itself says part of that slope isn't expectation at all.
Here's the starting point. Bank Rate is 3.75%. It's been there since 18 December 2025. The last time the committee raised it was 3 August 2023, when it went from 5% to 5.25%. Six meetings in 2026 have come and gone without a change: 5 February, 19 March, 30 April, 18 June, 30 July and 17 September. The next announcement is 5 November 2026, from a meeting that ends on 4 November, and it comes with a Monetary Policy Report.
Will interest rates go up in November? What the curve priced on 24 September
The Bank publishes its estimated swap curves daily, and the short end is the cleanest read on what a rate decision is worth in money. Take the sterling curve for 24 September 2026, the most recent day in the file. The one month spot rate was 3.7386%. That month runs from 24 September to 24 October, and contains no rate decision, so it is effectively the market's read of the overnight rate while Bank Rate stays at 3.75%.
The two month spot rate was 3.7960%. That window reaches to 24 November, so it straddles the 5 November decision: 42 days at the current setting, then about 19 days at whatever comes next. Solve for the second leg and you get 3.9236%, which is 0.185 percentage points above the first. That is about 74% of a 0.25 point step. The Bank's own instantaneous forward rate two months out was 3.9207% on the same day, which is the same answer arrived at a different way.
Read it as a probability only if you assume the outcome is either a hold or a quarter point rise, with nothing in between. Under that reading the curve was pricing something close to a three in four chance. Read it more cautiously and it is simply the expected size of the move: about 0.19 percentage points, less than a full step.
Further out the curve is steeper. The chart plots the instantaneous forward rate at 1, 3, 6, 12, 18 and 24 months from 24 September 2026: 3.78%, 4.05%, 4.40%, 4.83%, 4.91% and 4.84%. The peak sits around 4.91%, about 1.13 points above the one month rate. The committee described the same thing in its September minutes, saying the curve was "upward sloping and had risen further since the MaPS response window had closed, peaking at around 4.9% by end-2027".
What a 0.25 point rise costs on a £150,000, £250,000 and £350,000 tracker
A tracker is priced as Bank Rate plus a fixed margin, so a quarter point move on Bank Rate is a quarter point move on your rate. The Bank's quoted rate for a new two year 75% loan to value variable mortgage was 4.23% in August 2026, which is 0.48 points above Bank Rate. Take that as the starting rate and a 20 year remaining term, and the arithmetic is fixed.
| Balance | Monthly payment at 4.23% | At 4.48% | Change a month | First month's extra interest | Extra over 20 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £150,000 | £927.25 | £947.36 | £20.10 | £31.25 | £4,825 |
| £250,000 | £1,545.42 | £1,578.93 | £33.51 | £52.08 | £8,041 |
| £350,000 | £2,163.59 | £2,210.50 | £46.91 | £72.92 | £11,258 |
Those figures assume the payment is rebuilt over the remaining term rather than the term being shortened. A shorter term makes the monthly change smaller and a longer one makes it bigger, but not by much: on £250,000 the change is £31.76 over 15 years and £35.20 over 25.
If the whole path in the curve turned out to be right, the numbers are larger. A 1.13 point rise, the distance from the one month rate to the peak of the forward curve, adds £92.75 a month on £150,000, £154.59 on £250,000 and £216.43 on £350,000. That is the market's priced path, not a prediction, and the next section explains why the Bank thinks part of it is something else.
Your payment goes up by less than your interest bill does
Look again at the £150,000 row. The payment rises £20.10 but the first month's interest rises £31.25. The gap is £11.15, and it comes out of capital repayment. Before the rise, £398.50 of the payment was clearing debt. After it, £387.36 is. On £350,000 the split is starker: the payment goes up £46.91 while interest goes up £72.92, so £26.01 less principal comes off each month.
That is why the twenty year total in the table is so much larger than twelve times the monthly change. On £250,000 the payment rises £402 a year, but the total paid across the term rises £8,041. The extra cost is not the monthly figure repeated. It is the monthly figure plus the compounding effect of a balance that shrinks more slowly. Stretch that 0.25 point rise across the whole 20 year term and it is worth £8,041 on a £250,000 balance, which is the duration of the debt doing the work rather than the size of the rate move. The same mechanism runs in reverse on a cut, and it is the arithmetic that governs bond duration and how much prices fall when rates rise.
The 6 to 3 vote hides four more members leaning the same way
The headline in September was a 6 to 3 vote to hold. Megan Greene, Catherine L Mann and Huw Pill wanted 0.25 points, taking Bank Rate to 4%. Read the individual statements, though, and the split looks narrower than three votes.
Andrew Bailey said that if the conflict in the Middle East persists and the risk of second round effects rises, "it is likely that policy may have to tighten". Sarah Breeden said that if those risks crystallise, "it becomes increasingly appropriate for Bank Rate to respond". Clare Lombardelli said "the case for raising Bank Rate is building the longer the conflict continues without lasting resolution". Dave Ramsden said that were upside pressures to keep building, "there could be a case for increasing Bank Rate".
Four of the six holders, including the Governor, wrote a conditional hawkish sentence into the minutes. Only Swati Dhingra and Alan Taylor did not. Taylor went the other way, putting his estimate of the neutral rate at 3% and noting that the curve is "now higher, at all maturities at and beyond the two-year point, than at the final hike of the 2022-23 cycle when inflation stood at 6.8%". So the Bank of England interest rate decision on 5 November turns on a conditional that four holders have already written down, and the condition is about energy.
The market survey and the market curve disagree, and the Bank said why
This is the part most coverage skips. The Bank runs a Market Participants Survey, and the September round closed on 4 September. Nearly all respondents expected no change at that meeting, and beyond it "median expectations had implied a prolonged period of unchanged Bank Rate". A prolonged hold. Meanwhile the swap curve was climbing towards 4.9%.
Two market-based measures of the same thing, disagreeing outright. The Bank refereed it in the minutes: "elevated risk premia were thought to remain a material contributor to the upward slope in the market curve", consistent with "increased volatility across energy and interest rate markets since the onset of the conflict". In plain terms, part of the height of the curve is the price of insurance against a bad outcome, not a central expectation.
The main objection to treating 74% as a probability starts there. The Bank attached that judgement to the slope of the curve, which is the part reaching beyond the next meeting. A two month calculation leans on less of that slope than a two year one does, by construction. That does not make it clean. Megan Greene put the committee's side of it bluntly, arguing that "we cannot rely on premia to do our work for us". The history of policy rates across countries, which the central bank interest rate history sets out, is full of curves that were confidently wrong.
3.1% inflation is mostly motor fuel, and that is the whole argument
Consumer price inflation was 3.1% in the twelve months to August 2026, up from 2.9% in July. The Office for National Statistics named the cause: "Transport, particularly motor fuels, made the largest upward contribution to the monthly change". Core inflation, which strips out energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, was 2.6% and unchanged. Services inflation was 3.4% and unchanged, down from 4.5% in March.
The Bank put a number on the split. Of the 1.1 point overshoot against the 2% target, "around 0.7 percentage points" came from the direct effects of energy prices, mostly motor fuels. The committee expects headline inflation to reach around 3.75% in 2026 Q4, which the minutes write as 3 and three quarters percent, against 3.2% projected in the July report. It expects slightly above 4% in 2027 Q1.
Energy is why. Ofgem raised its price cap by 4% for 1 October to 31 December 2026, from £1,663 to £1,723 for a typical dual fuel household paying by direct debit, an increase of £60 a year. Ofgem attributed it to "higher wholesale gas prices as a result of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East". The committee expects the cap to rise substantially further in 2027 Q1. That £1,723 is already net of the electricity VAT cut, which took 5% off the electricity half of the bill from 1 October 2026 until 31 March 2027.
Asking whether interest rates will go up in November is really asking whether that energy shock has reached wages. So the argument inside the committee is narrow and specific. The committee is not arguing about whether petrol got dearer. It is arguing about whether the shock starts showing up in wages and in firms' prices, which is what it calls second round effects. On the evidence so far it hasn't. Private sector regular pay growth was 2.9% in the three months to July, down from 3.3% at the start of the year, though the Bank reads underlying pay growth as nearer 3.5%. Unemployment was 4.9% in the three months to July, unchanged since the three months to April.
Most mortgage holders would not feel a November move for years
Interest rate rises in 2026 would land unevenly. In 2026 Q2, 90.6% of new mortgage lending by value was at a fixed rate, according to the Financial Conduct Authority's lending returns, against total outstanding residential balances of £1.76 trillion. A fixed rate holder feels nothing on 5 November. They feel it when the deal ends, at whatever the market is charging then. What the market was charging in early October was 5.98% on the average two-year fix, and mortgage rates in October 2026 at that level cost £1,607.70 a month on £250,000 over 25 years.
The Bank's July 2026 Financial Stability Report sized that. A little over 5 million households are projected to see repayments increase by the end of 2028, up from nearly 4 million at the December estimate. For the typical owner occupier rolling off a fix in the next two years the projected increase is £45 a month, well below the roughly £120 median increase between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024. The hardest hit group is narrower: nearly 750,000 households paying under 3% roll off during 2026, with an average increase of £170 a month.
Anyone sitting on a lender's revert rate is in a different position again. The average quoted revert to rate was 6.58% in August 2026, more than two points above the 4.23% on a new tracker. The gap between those two numbers dwarfs a quarter point either way, which is the context in which the fixed versus variable mortgage rates record is worth reading.
The strongest case against a rise, stated properly
Three members wanted a rise, so the case for one is on the record. The objection to it is stronger than the vote count suggests, and it rests on three things.
First, pass-through has disappointed the hawks. Bailey noted that indirect energy pass-through "has so far been weaker than we had expected", with "very limited evidence of emerging second-round effect". Dhingra pointed to consumption being subdued, vacancies below pre-pandemic levels and margins not expanding. Second, policy is already tight by the committee's own measure. Taylor's neutral estimate is 3%, which puts 3.75% three quarters of a point into restrictive territory before the curve's own tightening is counted. The quoted two year fixed mortgage rate was already around 95 basis points higher than before the conflict began.
Third, the shock is the wrong shape. On the hold camp's reading, core at 2.6% and services at 3.4%, both unchanged, is not what propagation looks like. Taylor's formulation was that policy "should respond to evidence of propagation rather than mechanically to volatile ticks in headline energy prices". If the Middle East de-escalates, the same logic cuts the other way, and Taylor said openly that "an easing of policy should be in sight".
What this arithmetic cannot tell you
The 74% is a reading of one day's curve, 24 September 2026, and it moved before you read this. Swap curves reprice on every energy headline, and the Bank noted that market intelligence in the days before its meeting showed "the perceived probability of near-term increases in Bank Rate had risen". A number derived from a curve inherits every one of that curve's problems, including the risk premium the Bank itself flagged.
The mortgage table is arithmetic, not a quote. It uses the Bank's average quoted rate for a new variable deal in August 2026, and your own margin over Bank Rate is whatever your contract says. The table also assumes a 20 year remaining term and an unchanged balance, so treat the columns as the shape of the answer rather than your statement.
And the committee does not vote on the curve. It votes on nine individual judgements about a conflict whose course no model contains. The July report's adverse scenario, which several members now describe as the more likely energy path, is a scenario, not a forecast.
What would change the answer
Will interest rates go up in November? The committee has published the condition rather than the answer, and three things carry more weight than another point of headline inflation. The first is services inflation. It has fallen from 4.5% in March to 3.4% in August, and that decline is the main evidence the hold camp cites. A reversal would remove it. The second is pay. Underlying private sector wage growth is around 3.5% on the Bank's reading, and the 2027 wage round is settled in the spring, which is exactly when the committee expects headline inflation to be above 4%. Mann's argument is about that sequence, not about petrol.
The third is the energy path itself. Ofgem's next cap decision covers January to March 2027, and the committee already expects a substantial rise. If crude and gas prices fall back instead, the 2027 Q1 peak shrinks and the conditional sentences that four holders wrote never trigger. The 5 November announcement comes with a Monetary Policy Report, so the committee's own projections for interest rates in November 2026 and beyond arrive on the same day as the decision. LedgerTouch holds a rate field on a mortgage liability, and a 5 November change is what would alter it.