Data as of Aug 21, 2026.

You are the lender and a company is the borrower. Higher yield than a Treasury is not a bonus — it is the price of the possibility that the borrower runs into trouble.

Three things to know before you read a number in this table. Each row is a published series, not a bond for sale — several of these are averages across hundreds of bonds, and an average is not a price anyone will fill you at. The Basis column says what each row measures, and rows measured differently are not comparable with one another however close the numbers look. And the Observed column dates the reading: NOT CURRENT means the publisher is overdue and the figure shown is the last one they released, not today's. The note under the table says which rows belong to this category and which are here only as a benchmark to measure it against.

ICE BofA index effective yields (via FRED), plus the investment-grade option-adjusted spread — which is a difference between two yields in percentage points, not a rate — and the 10-year constant-maturity Treasury yield for reference. The index rows are market-value-weighted averages across hundreds of bonds: an individual bond can yield materially more or less, and no index level is something you can buy.

Why this section sits between the rates and the risks rather than at the end: two bonds quoting the same number do not pay you the same amount. Bond interest is generally taxed as ordinary income federally, at your own marginal rate, and what differs between the families is whether your state also taxes it and whether any federal exemption applies. A headline yield is a before-tax figure everywhere on this site, so the comparison that matters to you is the one made after the paragraphs below.

A fund is how most people end up owning this category, and it is not the same instrument as the bonds inside it. The yield column here counts the cash already paid out over the last year against today's share price, so it describes what has happened rather than what the holdings are contracted to earn — the two can differ by a wide margin in either direction. The other difference is the one people notice late: an individual bond has a date on which it repays, and a fund does not. It keeps selling and rebuying, so there is no maturity to wait for if the price falls.

Most people arrive at bonds expecting the only question to be whether the borrower pays. The list below is the answer to a different question: the ways the money shrinks while every payment arrives exactly on schedule. Prices fall when new bonds pay more than yours, inflation can outrun a fixed payment, and a borrower who repays early hands the cash back at the worst moment to reinvest it. Read these before the yield, not after it.

• Credit and default riskThe company may not pay. Even in default you usually recover something, but recovery on senior unsecured debt is a fraction of par and arrives years later after a bankruptcy process.
• Downgrade and spread riskYou do not need a default to lose money. A downgrade, or a general widening of credit spreads, marks your bond down immediately. A fall from BBB− to BB is a forced seller event for every fund with an investment-grade-only mandate.
• Interest-rate riskA corporate bond carries all the duration risk of a Treasury of the same maturity, plus its own credit risk on top. Both can move against you at once.
• Call riskA par call near maturity, or a make-whole call earlier, lets the issuer end the arrangement. Issuers call when refinancing is cheaper for them, which is exactly when it is worse for you.
• LiquidityThe corporate market is dealer-driven. A given bond may not trade for weeks, the quoted price embeds a mark-up, and in stressed markets dealers widen or withdraw.
• Event riskA leveraged buyout, a large debt-funded acquisition or a spin-off can add leverage overnight. Your coupon does not rise to compensate; the bond price falls instead.