EE bonds interest rates for bonds issued from 1980 through April 1995

EE bonds earn interest until the first of these events: You cash in the bond or it reaches 30 years old. Therefore, these bonds have stopped earning interest.

If you moved your EE bond into a TreasuryDirect account, and it was issued from 1980 through April 1995, we paid you for the bond as soon as it reached 30 years and stopped earning interest.

If you still have a paper EE bond, check the issue date. If that date is more than 30 years ago, it is no longer increasing in value and you may want to cash it. See Cashing EE and I savings bonds.

To find out how much your paper EE savings bond is worth, use our Savings Bond Calculator.

The calculator will also tell you when the bond stopped earning interest (Final Maturity).

How did my bond increase in value?

The original price of EE bonds that we sold from 1980 through April 1995 was one-half its face value. (For example, a $50 bond cost $25.)

The bond started to earn interest on its cost (not on its face value).

We added interest to the bond either every month or every six months. Also, every sixth month from issue, we began applying the bond’s interest rate to a new value: the sum derived from taking the bond’s previous value and adding the total interest the bond earned in the following six months.

This is called semiannual compounding. With it, your money grew not just from the interest percentage but from the fact that the interest was calculated on a growing balance.

How did we figure the interest rate for these bonds?

EE bonds that we issued before May 1995 earned interest in one of 2 ways, either

• at a guaranteed rate or rates
• at a market-based rate (85% of 6-month averages of 5-year Treasury security yields)

For each bond, we calculated which of these 2 ways gave the bond its highest value if we had used that way by itself over the entire time you held the bond.

Understanding the 2 ways we figured interest

Sometimes it helps to think about how these savings bonds earned interest by seeing 2 parallel, but entirely separate and independent, interest-earning paths, both starting on a certain date.

For EE bonds issued from November 1982 through April 1995, that date was the issue date of the bond.

• On one path, the bond earned interest only at a guaranteed rate or rates for the entire period.
• On the other path, the bond earned interest only at market-based rates for the entire period.

In other words, we compared the cumulative effect of applying only market-based rates for the entire period to the cumulative effect of applying only the guaranteed rate(s) for that entire period.

Knowing the guaranteed interest rate(s) for my bond

The easiest way to find out how much an EE bond from before May 1995 is worth is to use the Savings Bond Calculator.

If you want to figure out for yourself or to understand how your bond grew in value by the guaranteed interest rate path, you will be interested in this information. Each EE savings bond from this period had an original guaranteed rate that lasted for 9 to 18 years. It then had a new guaranteed rate for all its years after that until it stopped earning interest.

Part 1: Interest during the original maturity period. The guaranteed rate depended on the date we issued the bond because that gave the bond's original maturity period and the rate we guaranteed for that time.

This table tells you the rates and length of time the bonds earned that rate:

EE bond issue date	Overall rate of return originally guaranteed for original maturity period	Original maturity period
March 1993 – April 1995	4% per year, compounded semiannually	18 years
November 1986 – February 1993	6% per year, compounded semiannually	12 years
November 1982 – October 1986	7.5% per year, compounded semiannually	10 years
May 1981 – October 1982	9% per year, compounded semiannually	8 years
November 1980 – April 1981	8% per year, compounded semiannually	9 years
January 1980 – October 1980	7% per year, compounded semiannually	11 years

Part 2. Interest rate after the original maturity date. The rate could change after the original maturity date. Bonds that entered an extended maturity period from May 1989 through February 1993 had a guaranteed minimum rate of 6 percent during that extended maturity period. All other extended maturity periods had a guaranteed rate of 4 percent.

What was the market-based rate for bonds that we issued before May 1995?

Every May 1 and November 1, we calculated the market rate to apply to these EE bonds.

We based the rate on the 5-year Treasury securities yield and then set the rate this way:

• We took 85 percent of the average of these yields for the applicable earning period.
• We rounded the rate to the nearest one-hundredth of one percent for bonds issued May 1989 and later, and for bonds and notes which entered an extended maturity period on or after that date. Otherwise, we rounded the rate to the nearest one-quarter of one percent.

We then applied the resulting rate to the entire period for which the bond was entitled to market-based earnings.

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