What Is a Good APY for Crypto, and When Is It Too High?
Start with what dollars earn without any crypto at all. On October 13, 2026, the US Treasury's daily bill rates put 13-week T-bills at 4.19%, 4-week at 3.98% and 52-week at 4.47%: call it 4%. Against that, the Binance Earn page on October 14 showed dollar stablecoins in Flexible products mostly between 3.61% and 6.78%, ETH largely between 1.3% and 1.9% with ETH Staking at 2.23%, and a handful of small tokens in double digits.
So a stablecoin rate a point or two above 4% is ordinary at the moment. ETH below 4% is not a red flag, because it pays you in ETH. A double-digit rate is not automatically a scam, but someone or something is paying for the part above the floor, and you want to know what.
Every platform figure on this page comes from the October 14, 2026 snapshot. Rates move daily; whatever the product page shows when you open it is what applies. We don't recommend products here.
The floor: what plain dollars earn
| US Treasury bill | Rate (coupon equivalent) | Date |
| 4-week | 3.98% | Oct 13, 2026 |
| 13-week | 4.19% | Oct 13, 2026 |
| 52-week | 4.47% | Oct 13, 2026 |
A T-bill is a short loan to the US government, repaid in weeks or months. In dollar terms it is about as close as you get to earning interest without taking on credit risk, which is why it works as a floor: if a dollar-denominated earn product pays 4%, it pays roughly what idle dollars could have earned anyway.
Anything above that line is the interesting part. A USDT product at 6% is offering about 2 points more than the floor; at 15%, about 11 points more. Those points come from somewhere. Either somebody is topping the rate up, or you are carrying a risk the T-bill holder isn't.
The floor moves with interest rates, so we don't keep a fixed "normal APY" in our heads; we compare against whatever bills pay that month. It is also a dollar floor. Dollar stablecoins line up against it directly. Coins that pay interest in themselves need a different lens.
Where earn rates sat on October 14
- Dollar stablecoins, Flexible: USDC 3.87%, USDT 6.45%, U 6.78%, USDT RWA 3.61%.
- Euro stablecoin: EURI 1.1% Flexible. It tracks the euro, so a US T-bill is the wrong yardstick for it.
- ETH: 1.3% to 1.9% across Flexible and Locked; ETH Staking 2.23% Locked.
- Small tokens: KAIA 20.71% Flexible, PLUME 11.13% Flexible, SENT 1.03% to 25.9%.
Two banners sat on the same page: "Enjoy Up to 5% APR with USDC" and "VIP Exclusive: 5.5% APR with 200,000 USDC Tier". The words doing the work are "Up to" and "Tier". Neither number is what every account earns on every dollar.
ETH paying less than a T-bill doesn't make it abnormal. Interest arrives in ETH and the principal is ETH, so a year later you hold more coins; whether you made money in dollars depends almost entirely on the ETH price, and the yield is a rounding error next to that. We walk through the numbers in more coins, less money: coin or dollar terms.
The double-digit lines work the same way. Suppose you held a token at 20.71% for a full year, the rate never changed, there was no compounding, and the token fell 30% over that year. In dollars you would still be down about 15.5%. That is arithmetic, not a view on any project.
The rate itself isn't a promise either. Binance's help center article introducing Locked products says the APR is not fixed and can change daily unless stated otherwise. Flexible rates move too; why flexible APR keeps moving explains how.
How a headline rate is put together
The English Earn page shows a "Real-Time APR" column and a separate "Bonus Tiered APR" column. When a promotion advertises a single big number, it can be both added together, with the bonus applying only to a capped amount and only until a set date. Read the tier limits and the end date before you compare the headline with anything.
Here is why the cap matters, using made-up numbers that are not any current offer: a 6% headline built from a 2% real-time rate plus a 4% bonus on the first 3,000 USDT. Assume the real-time rate stays at 2% and ignore compounding.
| Amount (hypothetical) | Earning 6% | Earning 2% | Blended rate |
| 3,000 USDT | 3,000 | 0 | 6.0% |
| 10,000 USDT | 3,000 | 7,000 | 3.2% |
| 30,000 USDT | 3,000 | 27,000 | 2.4% |
In this made-up case the larger balance lands under the 4% floor, while the banner still says 6%. Nothing on it is false; the cap just sits in smaller type. For more on short-lived stablecoin promotions, see the section on promo rates in is putting USDT on Binance to earn reliable.
We subtract the T-bill rate first. Whatever is left has to come with an answer to who pays it, for how long, and up to what balance. A capped, dated bonus answers all of that, and whether it's worth chasing depends on how much you hold. When a rate can't answer those questions, we leave our spare cash out of it, however good the number looks.
What the extra above 4% costs
When the source is printed on the page, it's usually a bonus with a cap and an end date.
When it isn't, the extra tends to be payment for risk that sits nowhere near the rate. A stablecoin on an exchange depends on the exchange and on the coin's issuer. USDT and USDC are both dollar coins, yet on October 14 they were 6.45% and 3.87% in Flexible, more than 2.5 points apart; how the stablecoin rates compare looks at that gap. For the ways principal can actually shrink, product by product, see can you lose money on Earn.
With small tokens, the extra is paid for in price swings. The interest arrives as more of the same token, so the higher the rate, the more of that token you end up holding when it moves.
One wording note. People search for APY; Binance's English pages label rates as APR. APY includes compounding and APR doesn't. At single-digit rates the gap is small: 6% APR compounded daily works out to about 6.18% APY. The conversion is in APR vs APY.
When a yield is too high
A single cutoff number would go stale as soon as rates moved. The SEC's investor education site, on its page about Ponzi schemes, flags patterns instead. Three of them apply directly to yield offers:
- "High returns with little or no risk. Every investment carries some degree of risk, and investments yielding higher returns typically involve more risk. Be highly suspicious of any 'guaranteed' investment opportunity."
- "Overly consistent returns. … Be skeptical about an investment that regularly generates positive returns regardless of overall market conditions."
- "Ponzi scheme promoters sometimes try to prevent participants from cashing out by offering even higher returns for staying put."
Set those beside the pages quoted above: rates labeled as changing daily, promotions with caps and end dates. A place that promises a fixed monthly return on “safe” principal, then sweetens the deal when you try to withdraw, has stopped being comparable to an earn product, whether it advertises 8% or 30%.
Questions that come up
What is a good APY for crypto right now?
On Binance's Earn page on October 14, 2026, dollar stablecoins in Flexible products mostly showed between about 3.6% and 6.8%, ETH around 1.3% to 2.2%, and a few small tokens double digits. The benchmark underneath is US Treasury bills, around 4% on October 13, 2026. Rates change daily, so the product page at the time you check is what counts.
Is a crypto APY above 10% always a scam?
No. Binance's own Earn list had small-token products at double-digit rates on October 14, 2026, and the main risk there is the token's price. Look at what the interest is paid in, who funds the part above the floor and for how long, and whether anyone guarantees the return, promises suspiciously steady results, or offers more to stop you withdrawing.
Will I earn the headline rate on my whole balance?
Often not. Binance's English Earn page lists a Real-Time APR and a Bonus Tiered APR separately, and promotional headlines can include a bonus that only applies up to a capped amount and for a limited period. Read the tier limits and end date before comparing it with anything else.
Platform rates are from the Binance Earn page as it stood on October 14, 2026; T-bill rates are the US Treasury's figures for October 13, 2026. Both change, so check the product page and the Treasury's current data. The balance examples are hypothetical. We don't recommend products or promise any return. Crypto assets are not covered by deposit insurance, and you can lose everything you put in.
