UK Yield Atlas

Fifty-six years of the price of time — gilts, linkers and breakevens linked to macro, stocks and hard assets. Built for long-term allocators.

Jan 1970 → Sep 2026681 month-endsNominal · Real · Breakeven

Overview

Start here: the UK 10-year — the discount rate behind every gilt, mortgage and equity valuation — against the US 10-year, the UK 2-year and inflation. When blue rises, borrowing gets dearer and existing bonds fall; when inflation (red) outruns it, cash is losing purchasing power. Era buttons zoom every chart on the page at once.

Yield curve explorer

Every maturity the Bank estimates, 1970 to today. Spot is the yield you could lock in now; forward is what markets imply for later — the gap between them is where rate expectations live. Tick maturities on and off, drag the slider to see the whole curve in any month (try late 2022, when inversion broke LDI portfolios). Blanks mean the Bank didn't estimate that point: routine under 6 months, and the 30-year only exists from 2016.

Curve on a month

Level heatmap — spot curve

Bright bands are high yields (mid-1970s, early 1980s and 90s); dark is the 2009–21 floor. The pale corner marks 25–40 years before 2016, which did not exist.

Linkers & breakevens — the real price of time

Index-linked gilts strip out inflation, so the green line is the market's true real return: +3–4% through the 80s and 90s, negative for a full decade after 2011 (which is why gold compounded and why duration snapped back so violently in 2022), back near +2% today. The dashed line is breakeven inflation — roughly what inflation must average for linkers to beat conventional gilts. Two footnotes that matter: it's RPI-based, about a point above CPI, and RPI changes formula in 2030.

Real 10-year: +3.6% (Jan-85) → −3.3% (Nov-21) → +2.0% (Sep-26). Negative real yields from 2011 to 2022 are why gold compounded and duration hurt when it reversed.

Regimes & signals

Three numbers that call the cycle. The level (10y) sets the price of duration. The slope (10y minus 2y) is the cycle gauge: negative and shaded means inversion — the classic pre-recession flag, right about a quarter of the time here but usually 6–18 months early, so treat it as a risk flag, not a timer. Curvature tells you whether the belly of the curve is rich or cheap. The table scores today's setup against 56 years.

Eras — what the curve was pricing

Seven episodes that explain the shapes above. Hit Show on any era to zoom every chart to it — each card gives the 10-year move and the one lesson worth keeping, from the 70s supply shocks to the 2022 LDI scramble.

Macro linkage

Yields don't move alone. Above: the 10-year against UK and US inflation and sterling (toggle £ in the legend) — inflation usually leads, policy follows, the currency keeps score. Below: the 10-year minus trailing inflation, a rough real yield for the years before linkers existed. Two honesty notes: UK inflation data currently runs to Mar-2025, so recent months carry the last print; and for the market's own real-yield measure, see Linkers.

Stocks vs yields

Shares live and die by the discount rate. Blue and brown include reinvested dividends — flip to Price only to see how much income mattered, rebase to any date to compare eras like-for-like. The red 10-year (inverted, right axis) is the headwind: falling line, rising yields. Below: whether bonds were cushioning stocks (negative, most of the time) or joining the sell-off (positive — 1974 and 2022, the two episodes that break 60/40).

UK total-return proxy tracks the Nasdaq UK total-return benchmark within ~0.3pp/yr since 2001 — close enough for regime work, not for performance fees.

Hard assets

What worked when paper didn't. Gold and silver, crude (the average barrel — the only oil series running back to 1970), and UK house prices. Log scale, so a doubling looks the same anywhere; the rebase matches Stocks. Below: gold plotted directly against the 10-year — the two great hedges, rarely cheap at the same time.

Allocator toolbox

Back-of-the-envelope kit. Left: pick a duration and a rate shock for the instant P&L, then the gilt engine — a rolling synthetic 10-year gilt running since 1970, so you can see what duration actually earned. Right: £100 grown through history in 60/40 and 40/30/30 mixes, rebalanced monthly. Illustrations for sizing positions, not forecasts.

Duration shock

Gilt total-return engine

£100 mix illustrator

Monthly-rebalanced from total-return indices, rebased to your date above. Gilts now included.

Custom mix — your weights

Gold 20% remainder

Data & methodology