With the standard variable rate on most mortgages hovering around 4%, it now costs 1,212 a month to repay a 200,000 mortgage over 20 years. That is 52 a month more than the payments cost last November, before interest rates started creeping upwards.

The good news is that, of 12 mortgage lenders in the market, only seven have passed on both rate hikes in full: ACC Bank, EBS, First Active, IIB Homeloans, Irish Nationwide, National Irish Bank and Ulster Bank.

The others have held back on at least one of the increases, with Permanent TSB being the most generous. Its customers used to pay one of the highest standard variable rates on the market. Now they enjoy one of the cheapest, at 3.85%. So instead of paying an extra 52 a month, Permanent TSB customers can expect to pay a lower increase of 31 a month on a 200,000 mortgage.

With more interest rate hikes in the pipeline, home owners should be taking steps to minimise the hit to their finances. This means checking out what interest rate you are on. If it is your lender's standard variable rate, the chances are you are paying over the odds.

Newer tracker mortgages, which the banks and building societies use to bring in new business, are generally a lot cheaper. On paper the rate differentials might not look like a lot. But remember that every 0.1% you chip off your mortgage rate is worth a saving of 1,000 over the lifetime of the loan for every 100,000 borrowed. The trick lies in hassling your bank because, unless you demand a switch, it will try to keep you on the higher SVR.

In addition to a lower rate of interest, trackers are more transparent than conventional mortgages because they are pegged to the base rate of interest set by the European Central Bank.

Every time the ECB moves, either up or down, tracker mortgages moves by exactly the same amount. So there is no scope for lenders slowly to extract more money from you over time by passing on all movements when interest rates are going up while holding back some of the decreases when rates fall.

The margin that trackers charge over ECB rates depend on the size of your mortgage so that, the more you borrow, the more you can expect to pay. For example, if your mortgage is worth less than 60% of the value of your home, National Irish Bank will give you a tracker rate of 3.29%. Apart from one-off promotional deals, this is the best variable rate available on the market and means an interest saving of almost 1,100 a year on a 250,000 mortgage compared with an SVR of 4%.

If your mortgage is worth less than 80% of the value of your home, NIB charges a higher tracker rate of 3.49%.

First Active, Bank of Ireland and ICS will do the same mortgage for a slightly lower tracker rate of 3.45% but you must borrow at least 250,000 to qualify.

For bigger mortgages, where more than 80% of the house price is borrowed, many lenders offer a tracker mortgage at 3.6% interest including AIB, Bank of Ireland, First Active, ICS, IIB Homeloans and Permanent TSB. The catch is that your mortgage must be at least 250,000 to get this rate.

If your home loan is smaller, check out Ulster Bank's tracker rate of 3.65%. It is open to anyone borrowing less than 92% of the value of their home, irrespective of the size of the mortgage.

Bank of Scotland, which pioneered tracker mortgages in Ireland, is also worth watching. At first glance its rates do not look so competitive, with a rate of 3.5% where less than 75% of the house price is borrowed and 3.75% for bigger amounts.

The attraction lies in Bank of Scotland's juicy discounts for new customers. These mean that, for the first two years, you pay 3.2% interest on a mortgage of 75% or more and only 2.95% for smaller amounts. Considering that the average life of a mortgage has fallen to less than eight years, these two-year discounts can really tip the arithmetic in Bank of Scotland's favour.

An added bonus is that it will pay new customers 1,000 to cover the legal fees involved in switching from another lender. Similar switching packages are offered by EBS and Ulster Bank.

These cash incentives give you a useful bargaining chip when haggling with your lender for a better interest deal. For example, if you are an existing mortgage customer at Bank of Ireland, you will only be offered one takeit-or-leave-it tracker rate of 3.75%.

But to pull in new business, it is willing to offer much better deals, including a 3.45% tracker for mortgages of more than 250,000 that are worth less than 60% of the value of the borrower's home.

While this deal is theoretically available only to new customers, you might find the bank is willing to bend the rule if you threaten to take your business to Bank of Scotland or one of the other banks that offers switching incentives.