How to Find the Market Value for CUSIP Bonds

Bonds and other securities traded in the United States each have a unique CUSIP number. CUSIP stands for Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures. These numbers help financial institutions identify the correct security when handling trades. If you know a bond’s CUSIP number, you can look up its market price on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s website. FINRA aggregates bond transaction information from broker-dealers and other sources and reports market prices as a percentage of a bond’s par, or face, value. If you know a bond’s par value, you can convert the percentage into its dollar market value.

Visit the Bonds page in the Market Data section of the FINRA website.

Click “Advanced Bond Search” on the right side of the page to view various criteria you can use to search for bonds.

Click one of the three buttons under “Bond Type” to select the type of bond. You can choose from U.S. Treasury and agency bonds, corporate bonds or municipal bonds. For example, if you want to find the market value of a corporate bond, click the button next to “Corporate.”

Click the drop-down arrow in the “Search by” box and click “CUSIP.”

Click the adjacent text box and type the bond’s nine-character CUSIP number, which consists of numbers and letters. Click “Show Results” at the top of the page to view the bond’s information.

Find the bond’s price and divide it by 100. In this example, assume the bond’s price is 118.385, which means it trades for 118.385 percent of its par value. Divide 118.385 by 100 to get 1.18385.

Multiply your result by the bond’s par value to calculate its market value. Concluding the example, assume the bond’s par value is $1,000. Multiply 1.18385 by $1,000 to get a market value of $1,183.85.