The Co-operative Bank passed on slightly more.
Banks had also increased their fixed home loan rates.
On-call savings accounts received an increase of anything from nothing at ASB to five basis points (bps) at ANZ, through to 20bps at the Co-operative Bank.
Savers received less of an increase this time than they did at the last OCR review.
Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub described it as a “sad state of affairs”.
“It’s a worry that people have so much money in term deposits. Why do they bother? Park it in a conservative fund,” Eaqub said.
Infometrics acting managing director and chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan said floating rates were now comparable with what they were before the Reserve Bank cut the OCR from 3% to 2.5% last October.
“Whereas the OCR is currently lower, at 2.75%,” Kiernan said. “The savings rates were less responsive on the way down, so I’d expect them to be less responsive on the way up as well, particularly when the OCR is still reasonably low.
“However, in general, the deposit rates are still slightly below where they were before the October 2025 cut – so there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between how savings and mortgage rates have evolved over the last year. It might be that, because there’s not a lot of demand for borrowing at the moment due to the soft housing market, banks have a relatively good supply of deposit funds coming in, so they don’t need to try and entice more funds in the door by pushing up deposit rates.”
When the Reserve Bank updated the OCR, it urged banks to lift term deposit rates. Its data showed one-year term deposit rates were paying an average 3.94%, up from 3.85% in June and 2.79% a year earlier.
Eighteen-month term deposits were paying an average 4.13% from 3.86% a year earlier.
But six-month term deposit rates have barely moved this year and at an average 3.55% were down from 3.88% in August last year.
This week, ASB senior economist Chris Tennent-Brown said one-year term deposit rates were at an average of 3.9%, compared to a low of 0.75% in 2020 and 2021, and a high of 6.1% during 2023 to 2025.
“We think the bias will be up for the shortest terms and expect the longer-term rates to remain around current levels,” Tennent-Brown said.