Not as a rule. Some credit unions price genuinely well, plenty carry mediocre terms, and membership alone tells you nothing about which one you have. The popular belief that a credit union is automatically the cheapest place for a mortgage is unreliable. Most smaller credit unions do not fund mortgages with their own deposits. In practice a lot of them act as glorified brokers, passing your loan through to a processing center at a broker or an independent mortgage bank, which adds a middleman rather than removing one. Some credit unions do offer good terms, usually because they treat the mortgage as a member service rather than a profit center, and occasionally one keeps loans on its own books and prices a specific product aggressively. Others land mediocre to poor. The logo on the door settles nothing. The move is the same one we give for any lender: shop it. Get an apples-to-apples quote from the credit union, from a broker who can access many investors, and from a bank, all tied to your actual loan amount and credit profile, and compare the rate and the lender fees side by side. And shop for the best lender, since the cheapest quote can hide the wrong loan. Let the numbers decide.