Get your TrueRate for California

Tomo Mortgage created TrueRate because it's really hard to get an honest answer to a simple question—what's a good rate for me right now, and where can I get it? Even big mortgage companies struggle to figure out whether their interest rates are better or worse than another lender on any given day. But not having a clear and simple answer to “what's a good rate for me” costs homebuyers in the U.S. a lot of money—roughly $11 billion in 2025 alone.

We created TrueRate to make it easier for people to find lenders with low interest rates for their specific situation. Tomo Mortgage has lower rates a lot of the time, but we're not always the best pick for everyone 100% of the time. No lender is. But, when people have more information they can make better decisions, save money, and everyone wins.

TrueRate uses a mix of public and private data to estimate what rates lenders are actually offering to people like you. Rather than other websites that use lenders' advertised interest rates, we use real loan data (about a million loans, and we're adding tens of thousands every day). It focuses on one of the most common types of mortgage: 30-year, fixed-rate conventional loans for primary residences.

To answer this accurately, we take into account:

• Your credit score
• Your home price and down payment (so that we know the loan-to-value ratio)
• Your location (city and state)
• Discount points (we normalize our data to account for “par rate,” that is, a rate with zero added point fees and very close to the APR)

With all this data, we're able to see what other lenders are charging people in the same situation. We break down these rates into three categories:

• Good rate = better than 70% of lenders (top 30th percentile)
• Average rate = middle-of-the-road (50th percentile)
• Bad rate = higher than most people pay (bottom 70th percentile)

This way, you can see how your quote stacks up against the market.

Unlike other mortgage comparison tools, TrueRate doesn't use advertised rates provided by a small subset of lenders. Instead, TrueRate is a model that factors a wide range of lenders—over one thousand of them across the U.S. This includes big, independent mortgage companies, major banks, and small nonprofit credit unions. The model is trained on real loan data, pulled from both public records (like government mortgage databases) and private and proprietary sources (special datasets that include pricing and borrower traits).

We've tested and validated our model in two key ways.

• Benchmark tracking. Does our model yield similar results to 3rd party benchmarks?
• Control effectiveness. When we say we're controlling for variables in the loan scenario, does the model sufficiently capture the nuances of how each variable impacts market rate?

Here's how our model performed.

No, not exactly. TrueRate is designed to show you what's typical based on recent trends. Because we don't work directly with any specific lender (apart from ourselves), we can't promise a lender will give you that exact rate shown on the platform.

Think of TrueRate like a really smart compass—it shows you the direction and gives you a solid baseline to compare against, even though individual lender offers may still vary a bit. More important, the more data you have going into a conversation with a lender, the more confident you can be when negotiating an interest rate.

Here's what you get when you use TrueRate:

• A clear, customized look at the rate you should expect
• Confidence when comparing lenders or negotiating an offer
• A fair, apples-to-apples way to shop for a mortgage
• Zero gimmicks—just data-backed results

TrueRate won't magically get you the lowest rate on Earth. But it will tell you, honestly, whether the rate you're being offered is fair—and that's one of the smartest moves you can make when buying a home.