It's all about the CD "Specials". My credit union is only offering 1.75% for a 12-month CD, but 5.00% for 11 months. I worked in banking for nearly 30 years. They were notorious for offering great "specials", then hoping you weren't paying attention at maturity so they could roll you into a much lower rate CD for the same term. The credit unions may do something similar but I'm always shopping around when my CDs mature. I did find a bank with a money market "special" for 4.40%. I suppose the individual banks and credit unions have certain needs to address their individual interest rate risk profiles, thus the wildly different offerings. While trying to locate a decent CD rate, I found several institutions that seemed like they didn't care if they ever opened a CD for a customer.The bank I'm looking at still has 5%, but it's for 2 months. I was looking at the 12 month. I actually use 3 banks. One is "too big to fail," and the other 2 are regional.