While the buy-side has grown familiar with the ICE Municipal AAA Yield Curve over its years in production, many sell-side firms — underwriters, dealers, and trading desks — have yet to fully explore what a transaction-driven, continuously updating municipal curve can offer their businesses.

The ICE Municipal AAA Yield Curve is a quantitative, rules-based curve overseen by a dedicated evaluator who monitors and maintains it throughout each trading day. It is transaction-driven: yields update in response to executed trades in the secondary municipal securities market, with new-issue activity also taken into consideration. That transaction data is reflected as changes in the tenor points along the curve.

Roughly 856,000 tax-exempt bonds are attached to the curve, pricing off it either directly or indirectly. If the curve moves five basis points, the universe of bonds priced along the curve moves five basis points as well, absent other forces influencing price. Evaluated prices for those bonds refresh every 15 minutes, giving market participants a continuous view of where the market is trading.

Benefits of a dynamic, transaction-based curve

Figure 1 shows how the curve behaved for 10-year bonds on April 11, 2025 — the most volatile day in municipal securities markets since the height of COVID-era volatility in March 2020. As yields oscillated through the session, the curve provided live updates that allowed market participants to react more nimbly to rapidly developing events surrounding newly imposed U.S. trade tariffs.

Tighter alignment between curve and bond prices: because the curve is calibrated against observable market activity, the prices of bonds tied to it reflect those same dynamics. End-of-day NAV strikes, mark verification, and customer-facing runs all benefit from a curve anchored in transaction data.

A more rigorous tool for new-issue pricing: underwriting desks can use a curve that is calibrated against observable activity throughout the trading day to support pricing discussions with issuers and investors alike.

Accessibility for the sell-side

The ICE Municipal AAA Yield Curve is already broadly available. End-of-day curve data is made freely available to market participants through the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board's Electronic Municipal Market Access (MSRB EMMA) platform, and ICE clients can access it through the Bond Curve Viewer service. Sell-side firms looking to evaluate the curve against their own internal marks, trader runs, or historical pricing can begin doing so without significant infrastructure investment.

While the curve has been in production since 2019, it has been calculated for more than a decade, providing sufficient history for back-testing, model calibration, and integration into existing pricing workflows.

Looking ahead

Municipal bonds will continue to be an important asset class for fixed income investors seeking tax-advantaged strategies or tax-exempt holdings. A more transparent, dynamic, and transaction-driven curve can help make the market more robust, resilient, and efficient for all participants. In particular, the sell-side may benefit meaningfully from engaging with the ICE Municipal AAA Yield Curve as part of its new-issue pricing, trading, and hedging infrastructure.

For sell-side firms not yet using the curve, the starting point is simple: access it on MSRB EMMA or through the ICE Bond Curve Viewer and compare it against the marks your desks are producing today. Alternatively, firms may subscribe to the curve via streaming feed, request/response API, or file delivery.

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