Stats › Valuation › Credit spreads
High yield credit spreads
When a shaky company borrows money, it has to pay more than the government does. That extra bit of yield is the credit spread, and it's the price the bond market puts on the chance of not getting paid back. Watch it move and you're watching the collective nervousness of people whose whole job is worrying about default.
This page tracks the high yield version, the spread on bonds rated below investment grade, which is where the nervousness shows up first and largest. It has the current level, the all time high from the depths of 2008, the all time low from mid 2007, and the bit I think matters most: those two records are only eighteen months apart. The reason I keep coming back to this series is that it's the closest thing markets have to an honest stress gauge, and it's freely available, which is a rare combination.
One thing to be clear about up front. A low spread is not the same as a safe market. It means you're being paid very little for taking credit risk, and those are different statements. The page also covers why credit has tended to move before equities do, which is less about bond investors being cleverer and more about the shape of what they stand to gain and lose. Both sources are named and dated below, and the underlying series moves daily, so for today's number go to the primary source rather than trusting a figure on a page written weeks ago.
The ICE BofA US High Yield option adjusted spread was 2.79% in May 2026, near the low end of its range. The all time high was 21.82% in December 2008 and the all time low 2.41% in June 2007, a few months before the credit crisis began. Credit spreads are the single most useful stress indicator available because bondholders are paid to worry about default rather than growth, and they widen before equity markets fall in most episodes.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 2 named sources, roughly 1350 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.