NEW YORK — Credit card debt will soon get a bit easier to handle — a very little bit — now that the Federal Reserve has lowered the benchmark interest rate by a half-percentage-point.

It's not going to save the average card holder much money — certainly not enough to get your kid an iPod this holiday season. But the rate difference might buy you 30 or so songs to upload onto it.

In response to the Fed rate cut, commercial banks have been lowering their prime rate, which affects the approximately 85 percent of U.S. credit cards with variable rates, according to www.CardWeb.com Inc., an online publisher of payment card information. The prime rate, or what banks charge their best borrowers, has dropped to 7.75 percent from 8.25 percent, a level it's held at for 15 months until this week.

Right now, the standard fixed rate for credit cards is 13.48 percent and the standard-variable rate is 14.57 percent, according to personal finance Web site Bankrate.com.

The effect of the rate cut should trickle down to card holders starting in October or November, and if the lower rate holds over the next 12 months, that should translate to $30 per year in savings for people with the median card debt of $7,000, CardWeb said. That adds up to a total of $4 billion in interest rate savings for Americans with variable rate-based credit cards.

The prime rate is still well above where it was a few years ago. It dipped as low as 4 percent between mid-2003 and mid-2004 as the Fed loosened up monetary policy to keep the U.S. economy from falling into a deep recession.

When the Fed lowers its target fed funds rate, or the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans, commercial lenders soon follow up by lowering their rates to customers correspondingly.