Unchanged for Eleven Consecutive Months! China's Latest LPR Quotes Released: 5-Year Plus at 3.5%, 1-Year at 3%

China's April Loan Prime Rate (LPR) was released on April 20, with neither the 1-year nor the 5-year-plus LPR adjusted. The People's Bank of China authorized the National Interbank Funding Center to announce that the Loan Prime Rates (LPR) on April 20, 2026, were: 1-year LPR at 3.0% and 5-year-plus LPR at 3.5%. These LPRs remain valid until the next release. The LPR has remained unchanged for eleven consecutive months; the last adjustment occurred in May 2025, when both the 1-year and 5-year-plus LPRs were cut by 10 basis points. The Monetary Policy Committee of the People's Bank of China recently held its first-quarter 2026 meeting, emphasizing the need to strengthen guidance from the central bank's policy rates, improve the market-based interest rate formation and transmission mechanism, leverage the role of the market interest rate pricing self-discipline mechanism, and enhance supervision and enforcement of interest rate policies. The central bank also stated it would continue to implement a moderately loose monetary policy. It will prioritize promoting stable economic growth and reasonable recovery in prices as key considerations for monetary policy, maximizing the integrated effects of incremental and existing policies, as well as the synergy between monetary and fiscal policies. Lianhe Credit Rating previously projected in a research report that the LPR in 2026 will show a trend of stability with gradual declines, potentially seeing one to two interest rate cuts within the year. Meanwhile, the central bank may increasingly utilize various monetary tools, including open market operations. Cinda Securities believes that as a quantity-based tool, reserve requirement ratio cuts primarily aim to release lendable funds and address medium-to-long-term liquidity issues for banks. Currently, banks are not lacking in funds but face low willingness among households and enterprises to borrow. In this context, cutting the reserve requirement ratio may fail to alleviate the core contradiction of weak real economy financing demand and could even compress returns on the asset side of banks; therefore, the necessity for such cuts may be limited. According to previous reporting by 21st Century Business Herald, Wang Qing, chief macro analyst at Oriental Golden Credit, noted earlier that since the beginning of the year, LPR quotes have remained unchanged. The fundamental reason lies in exports significantly exceeding expectations early in the year, comprehensive improvements in domestic consumption and investment growth, and rapid development in new quality productive forces sectors including high-tech manufacturing. With strong momentum at the start of 2026 and low immediate demand for stabilizing growth, combined with the central bank's prior launch of a package of structural monetary policies in January to reinforce support for key areas like technological innovation and small and micro enterprises, these factors indicate that current monetary policy is in an observation phase. Ming Ming, chief economist and FICC chief analyst at CITIC Securities, pointed out that the central bank's current stance on aggregate tools remains to "flexibly and efficiently employ various monetary policy tools such as reserve requirement ratio cuts and interest rate cuts," while its phrasing regarding price-end intermediary targets is to "promote low-level operation of comprehensive social financing costs." This shows that although the stance on aggregate easing is clear, the actual pace of easing is flexibly determined by the central bank based on the recovery status of the real economy and the substance of credit expansion progress.