Not all financial institutions made our list for the best six-month CDs. We monitor over 80 financial institutions, including Capital One, PenFed, Discover, Chase, TD Bank, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, TIAA Bank, Colorado Federal Savings Bank and American Express Bank. To round out the score, we analyzed CD accounts further, valuing those with lower minimum deposits, daily compound interest schedules (rather than monthly) and those that are nationally available (think credit unions with an open versus limited membership).

Non-APY factors still played a part, such as customer experience. We believe that potential earnings reign supreme, so a CD’s APY was the most heavily-weighed factor in our calculations. Here are the categories we analyzed and how we weighted each. One with a score of 80 would get four stars and so on. An institution with a perfect score of 100 would get five stars. We looked at over 140 CDs offered by 84 financial institutions and evaluated them to create a star rating for each.