Vanguard, with roughly $2.9 trillion in 89 ETFs, is expanding its bond exchange-traded fund lineup with two new tax-exempt municipal bond ETFs, the asset management giant announced Thursday.
Both the Vanguard Long-Term Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (VTEL) and the Vanguard New York Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (MUNY) are designed for investors looking to generate tax-exempt income through high-quality fixed income. Each ETF comes with a 0.09% expense ratio and may be attractive to investors who prefer passive management, according to a press release issued by Vanguard.
“This is a really great time for investing in muni bonds,” Perryne Desai, senior fixed-income product manager at Vanguard, told etf.com. “When you look at the long end of the curve, you’re getting almost the same yield from a 30-year municipal product as you are in a Treasury product, and then you get the tax-equivalent benefit.”
The introduction of these funds builds on years of launching similar products, starting with the flagship Vanguard Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (VTEB) in 2015. The firm then debuted the Vanguard Short-Term Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (VTES) in 2023, followed by the Vanguard Intermediate-Term Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (VTEI) and Vanguard California Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (VTEC) in 2024. The two funds introduced today “represent the finality of that lineup build in a lot of ways,” Desai said.
VTEL offers investors exposure to longer duration municipal bonds, low fees, tax efficiency and trading flexibility.
“We wanted to create the duration positioning for clients so they can choose where along the curve they’d like to invest, rather than having an all-curve product,” Desai added. “Lots of people are very happy and comfortable in our VTEB product, but some like to break up duration into the various buckets—short, intermediate and long—and we wanted to make sure that they had the tools and the toolkit that they would want to use.”
And like the California-specific VTEC, MUNY gives investors in a large, high-tax state the ability to access muni bonds from their state at a low cost.
Vanguard’s suite of muni products now includes six index ETFs, two active ETFs, 12 active mutual funds, one index mutual fund and three money market funds.
