The Yield Curve
What US Treasuries pay across maturities, whether the curve is inverted today, and every inversion since 1976 — with the recession that followed each one.
Right now
+0.33 The 10-year yields 0.33 percentage points more than the 2-year, so the curve is not inverted — and has been upward-sloping since 2024-09-06.
| Maturity | Yield | Relative to the 10-year | Where it sits in its own history |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 monthsDGS3MO | 4.00% | -0.95 pts | 51th percentile |
| 2 yearsDGS2 | 4.56% | -0.39 pts | 49th percentile |
| 10 yearsDGS10 | 4.95% | — | 46th percentile |
Percentiles are against the full history of each series, which begins 1962-01-02 for the 10-year. The 10-year minus 3-month spread, the other curve measure people watch, is currently +0.89.
The 10-year minus 2-year spread since 1976
Every inversion, and what followed
| Inverted from | Until | Length | Next recession began | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-07-06 | 2024-09-05 | 792 days | none yet | — |
| 2005-12-27 | 2007-06-05 | 525 days | December 2007 | 23 months |
| 2000-02-02 | 2000-12-28 | 330 days | March 2001 | 13 months |
| 1998-05-26 | 1998-07-27 | 62 days | March 2001 | 33 months |
| 1990-03-08 | 1990-03-29 | 21 days | July 1990 | 4 months |
| 1988-12-13 | 1989-11-06 | 328 days | July 1990 | 19 months |
| 1980-09-12 | 1982-07-16 | 672 days | July 1981 | 10 months |
| 1978-08-18 | 1980-05-01 | 622 days | January 1980 | 16 months |
Episodes separated by less than 90 days are merged, because the spread crossing zero for a week does not end an inversion in any meaningful sense. Recession dates are the NBER's business-cycle peaks. Lead time is measured from the first day of the inversion.
What the curve is
The US Treasury issues debt across maturities from four weeks to thirty years, and each trades at its own yield. Plotting yield against maturity gives the curve. Normally it slopes upward: lending money for ten years carries more uncertainty than lending it for three months, so it pays more.
An inversion is when it does not — when short-dated debt pays more than long-dated. That is unusual, and it says something specific: that the market expects short-term rates to be lower in future than they are now, which generally means it expects the central bank to be cutting, which generally means it expects the economy to weaken.
Why anyone cares
Every US recession since the 1970s has been preceded by an inversion of the 10-year minus 2-year spread. That is a genuinely striking record and it is the reason the indicator gets the attention it does.
Three things are worth holding alongside it. The lead time varies enormously — the table above shows the spread. It has produced signals that were not followed by a recession, so "never wrong" is not the claim. And the sample is small: a handful of episodes over fifty years is not many observations to build confidence on, however clean the pattern looks.
The un-inversion is the part people miss
Recessions have historically begun after the curve returns to normal, not while it is inverted. The steepening happens because the short end falls as the central bank starts cutting — which it does once the weakness it was anticipating begins to show up.
So reading a return to an upward slope as an all-clear inverts the historical pattern. It has usually been the later signal, not the cancellation of the earlier one.
2s10s or 3m10s
Two versions are in common use. The 10-year minus 2-year is the one most widely quoted. The 10-year minus 3-month has some academic support as the better predictor, and the two do not always agree — there have been stretches where one was inverted and the other was not. Both are shown above for that reason.
Where this comes from
Federal Reserve H.15 constant-maturity Treasury yields, distributed through FRED. A work of the US government, free to use, and published here as actual values with full history rather than as summary statistics. The rest of the Markets section is on the Markets overview, and every ticker's sensitivity to these rates is on its page in the correlation finder.