Reviewed 12 August 2026 · Sourced from the FOMC's implementation notes, the New York Fed, the Federal Reserve Act, the FOMC's Statement on Longer-Run Goals and FRED
The federal funds rate is what banks charge each other to borrow reserves overnight — and the Federal Reserve does not set it. The Federal Open Market Committee sets a target range, currently 3.50% to 3.75%, and the rate that actually trades inside that range printed 3.63% on 10 August 2026.
It matters because the Fed needs one price it can control in order to influence all the prices it can't. Fed funds is the shortest, safest dollar interest rate there is, so it sits underneath everything built on top of it — the prime rate, your card's APR, a business line of credit, a savings APY. The Fed's job runs in two stages: first hit its own target, then hope the rest of the economy follows. Neither stage is automatic, and the second one is where most of the confusion lives.
- The Fed does not set the federal funds rate. The FOMC announces a target range — 3.50% to 3.75%, effective 11 December 2025 — and the rate that actually prints is a market outcome inside it.
- The real number is the effective federal funds rate (EFFR): a volume-weighted median of overnight interbank transactions reported on the FR 2420 form, published each morning by the New York Fed. It was 3.63% on 10 August 2026.
- Since the 2008 crisis the Fed steers the rate with administered rates, not open market operations. Interest on reserve balances at 3.65% is the main lever, the ON RRP facility at 3.50% is the floor, and the discount window primary credit rate at 3.75% plus the Standing Repo Facility form the ceiling.
- The mandate is statutory. 12 U.S.C. § 225a names “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” The 2% target is the Committee's own choice, not the statute's, and it is measured on PCE inflation, not CPI.
- The dot plot is not a plan. Each dot is one participant's own assessment of appropriate policy. In June 2026 the median end-2026 dot was 3.8% and the individual submissions ran from 3.4% to 4.4%.
- Mortgages are not priced off fed funds. The Dallas Fed estimates only about 20% of a fed funds move reaches the 30-year mortgage rate, against 85% for the 10-year Treasury yield — which is why a Fed cut can land in the same week mortgage rates rise.
- Borrowing costs move fast; deposits crawl. A card indexed to prime resets within a statement or two, while a saver's APY follows over months and never fully — New York Fed deposit betas peaked near 60% in the 2004 cycle and stayed under 40% from 2015 to 2019.
What the federal funds rate actually is
The news says the Fed raised rates. Over the next four months, three things happen at one kitchen table. The credit card APR goes up a quarter point, on a statement that arrives with no warning. The savings rate goes up two hundredths of a point, eight weeks later. The 30-year fixed mortgage payment does not change by a cent — and the rate a neighbor is quoted on a new mortgage goes up by more than the Fed moved.
Start with that sentence, because it contains the mistake everything downstream is built on.
It sets a target range for it. The rate that actually happens — the effective federal funds rate, or EFFR — is the outcome of real transactions between real banks, and the Fed steers it into that range with a separate set of tools. Two numbers, two publishers, two different kinds of thing. Almost every article about “the Fed's interest rate” collapses them into one.
The underlying thing
Strip away the policy and it is a plain interest rate on a plain loan. Banks hold accounts at the Federal Reserve; the balances in them are reserves. A bank with more reserves than it needs tonight lends them to a bank with fewer, unsecured, until morning. That price is the federal funds rate. Banks are not the only players — the St. Louis Fed describes the market as “domestic unsecured borrowings in U.S. dollars by depository institutions from other depository institutions and certain other entities, primarily government-sponsored enterprises.”
Nobody reading this borrows at it: the loans are overnight, unsecured, between institutions, in sizes measured in millions. Its importance is derivative — it is the shortest, safest dollar interest rate in the economy, and so the floor everything longer and riskier is priced against.
And the textbook reason for it is stale
Generations learned that banks trade fed funds overnight to satisfy reserve requirements. The Federal Reserve Board cut reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective 26 March 2020, eliminating them for every depository institution in the country. The market still exists; that explanation stopped describing it in March 2020.
The target range and the rate that actually prints
Two numbers. Keep them apart and the rest of this page is easy.
The target range is what the FOMC votes on: 3.50% to 3.75% since the December 2025 decision took effect on 11 December 2025. It is an announcement, not a measurement.
The effective federal funds rate is what banks actually transacted at: 3.63% on 10 August 2026, and every business day of that week. It is a measurement, not an announcement.
The Fed has published a range rather than a single point since December 2008 — an admission that pinning a market rate to the basis point is not something a central bank can promise. The New York Fed calculates the effective rate as a volume-weighted median of overnight federal funds transactions reported on the FR 2420 Report of Selected Money Market Rates, published around 9:00 a.m. Eastern each business day for the prior day. Median matters: the middle transaction by volume cannot be dragged around by a few odd trades the way an average could.
Today's rate ladder, in order
Every figure below is from the FOMC's implementation note of 10 December 2025 or the H.15 release of 11 August 2026.
| Rate | Level | Who sets it | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discount window primary credit | 3.75% | Board of Governors | A sound bank can always borrow here |
| Top of the target range | 3.75% | FOMC | The announced upper limit |
| Interest on reserve balances (IORB) | 3.65% | Board of Governors | The main lever |
| Effective fed funds rate, 10 Aug 2026 | 3.63% | The market | The actual outcome |
| Bottom of the target range | 3.50% | FOMC | The announced lower limit |
| ON RRP offering rate | 3.50% | FOMC | Non-banks can always lend here |
Read the arithmetic off that table and you can watch the machine work. The effective rate sits 13 basis points above the ON RRP floor, 2 below IORB and 12 below the top of the range — to the nearest hundredth, the exact midpoint of 3.625%. That is not luck. It is what a well-built corridor produces, and the corridor is the next section.
H.15, row “Federal funds (effective).” FRED series EFFR, plus DFEDTARU and DFEDTARL for the range. On this site, Markets · Economic pulls the rates block live from FRED.
How the Fed actually steers it, which changed after 2008
The mechanism changed almost twenty years ago and consumer explainers never caught up.
The old way, and why it broke
Before 2008 reserves were scarce, so the New York Fed's desk could move their price by changing their quantity — buying or selling Treasury securities each morning until the rate landed on target. Then asset purchases after the financial crisis and again in 2020 pushed reserves from tens of billions of dollars into the trillions, and a few billion either way no longer does anything measurable to an overnight rate. The Fed calls the current setup the ample reserves framework, and it needed different controls entirely.
The new way: administered rates
An administered rate is one the Fed declares and then honors, rather than one it tries to produce by trading. Three matter, and together they build a corridor the market rate has little reason to leave.
Interest on reserve balances (IORB) — the main lever, currently 3.65%. The Fed pays banks interest on reserves left in their Federal Reserve accounts. The authority came from the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006, was pulled forward to 1 October 2008 by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and is administered under Regulation D, 12 CFR Part 204. The logic is one sentence: a bank that can park reserves at the Fed risk-free at 3.65% will not lend them to another bank for meaningfully less. When the FOMC moves the target range, moving IORB is how it makes the move stick.
The ON RRP facility — the floor, currently 3.50%. Overnight reverse repurchase agreements. Cash holders that are not banks — money market funds, government-sponsored enterprises, primary dealers — cannot earn IORB, so the Fed lets them lend it cash overnight against Treasury collateral at a published rate, with a per-counterparty daily limit of $160 billion. The New York Fed says this “limit[s] downward pressure and help[s] provide a floor under overnight money market rates.” Nobody with access to a risk-free 3.50% lends privately at 3.30%.
The ceiling — the discount window and the Standing Repo Facility. The primary credit rate, 3.75%, is available to any depository institution in sound condition, capping what a bank should ever pay. The Standing Repo Facility does the same job in the market, letting primary dealers and eligible depository institutions borrow against Treasury, agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities. The New York Fed describes it as designed to “limit upward pressure and help provide a ceiling on money market rates.”
Open market operations still happen; the job changed. The December 2025 directive tells the desk to “Increase the System Open Market Account holdings of securities through purchases of Treasury bills… to maintain an ample level of reserves.” The trading keeps reserves ample so the administered rates keep working — maintenance on the machine, not the hand on the dial.
If an article says the Fed “raises rates by selling bonds,” or that banks “borrow overnight to meet reserve requirements,” it describes a system that stopped working that way in 2008 and 2020 respectively. Both are still in wide circulation. The FOMC's implementation note carries the real operating numbers and takes two minutes to read.
Who decides, and what they publish
The decision belongs to the Federal Open Market Committee: twelve voting members. Seven are governors of the Federal Reserve Board, confirmed by the Senate. One is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who holds a permanent vote and serves as Vice Chair, because New York's desk carries out the operations. The last four are Reserve Bank presidents rotating on one-year terms, one from each of four fixed groups: Boston–Philadelphia–Richmond; Cleveland–Chicago; Atlanta–St. Louis–Dallas; Minneapolis–Kansas City–San Francisco. All twelve presidents attend and take part; only four vote at a time, which matters for the projections, because the projections come from everybody.
The FOMC holds eight regularly scheduled meetings a year, on dates published more than a year ahead, and can act between them, as it did twice in March 2020. Each decision produces a statement at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, which is what gets quoted, and an implementation note carrying the target range, IORB, the ON RRP rate and limit, the primary credit rate and the desk's directive — the document that actually says what was done, and the one almost never covered.
The dot plot, and what it is not
Four times a year — March, June, September, December — the Fed publishes a Summary of Economic Projections, whose famous page charts each participant's projection for the appropriate midpoint of the target range at each year-end.
The Fed's own footnote: “Each participant's projections were based on information available at the time of the meeting, together with her or his assessment of appropriate monetary policy.” Four things follow. It is not a Committee decision — nobody votes on the dots. It is not a forecast of what the Fed will do, but individual judgments about what would be appropriate, each conditional on that person's own view. It includes all participants, voters and non-voters, so a majority of dots may belong to people who cannot vote this year. And it binds nobody: a participant may vote against their own dot at the next meeting.
The June 2026 SEP illustrates it. Eighteen participants submitted projections; the median federal funds rate for the end of 2026 was 3.8%, submissions ran from 3.4% to 4.4%, and the longer-run median was 3.1%. Hold that against the actual setting: a range of 3.50% to 3.75%, midpoint 3.625%. The median dot sat above where policy was. A headline could turn that into “the Fed plans to hike,” and be wrong twice — the median of nineteen opinions is not a plan, and the Committee has met since and left the range alone.
What the Committee is aiming at
The Fed does not pick its own objectives; they are in the statute. 12 U.S.C. § 225a, Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act, added by Congress in 1977, instructs the Board and the FOMC to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” That is three goals, and it is called the dual mandate anyway: the Fed's position is that delivering the first two brings the third with them.
The 2% target is the Fed's own number, not the statute's
“Stable prices” is not a number. The Committee supplied one itself, in the Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy, adopted January 2012 and reaffirmed effective 27 January 2026. The wording is precise and the precision is the point: “inflation at the rate of 2 percent, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures.”
The inflation figure in the news is almost always the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Fed's 2% target is measured on the PCE price index from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Different baskets, weights, formulas and publishers, and usually different answers. Comparing a CPI print to the 2% target compares two things never built to line up.
| Measure | Publisher | 12-month change | Through |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPI-U, all items | BLS | 3.4% | July 2026, released 12 Aug 2026 |
| CPI-U, less food and energy | BLS | 2.5% | July 2026, released 12 Aug 2026 |
| PCE price index — the target measure | BEA | 3.7% | June 2026, released 30 Jul 2026 |
Three numbers for the same phenomenon, more than a percentage point apart. Why they diverge belongs on the inflation page. What matters here is that the Committee watches the third row.
The employment half has no number at all
Deliberately. The same statement says maximum employment “is not directly measurable and changes over time owing largely to nonmonetary factors,” so “it would not be appropriate to specify a fixed goal for employment.” There is no unemployment target, only a judgment remade every meeting — and when the two halves conflict, the statement commits only to a balanced approach. The wider framework is the subject of Economics for Traders.
How it reaches you, and where it stops
The federal funds rate is an overnight loan between financial institutions. Nothing in that touches your life. It reaches you through a chain that is strong in one place, weak in another and broken in a third.
Link one: prime, which is a convention
Banks post a base rate for their strongest short-term commercial borrowers, by convention at the upper limit of the target range plus 3.00 percentage points: 3.75 + 3.00 = 6.75%. That has held at every Fed move since December 2015 and is written down in no statute, regulation or rule. The prime rate page takes it apart.
Link two: anything indexed to prime, which is fast
Variable-rate credit cards, home equity lines of credit, business and personal lines of credit, some private student loans. Your card's rate is prime plus a margin the issuer set when it approved you, and on a card that combined figure is also your APR. When prime moves a quarter point your APR moves a quarter point, usually within a statement cycle or two.
Link three: deposits, which is slow and partial
Savings rates follow too, and this is where savers get shortchanged. Researchers measure the pass-through as a deposit beta — the share of a policy move reaching what banks pay depositors. New York Fed work on Liberty Street Economics found cumulative betas peaking near 60% in the 2004 tightening cycle and never exceeding 40% across 2015 to 2019, reporting that “deposit rates follow the fed funds rate but are typically lower, particularly when the fed funds rate is elevated.” That is why a saver's APY lags a hiking cycle.
Link four: mortgages, which is not a link
It is priced off long-term yields — the 10-year Treasury plus a spread that widens with interest rate volatility and shifts with the slope of the yield curve. Dallas Fed researchers put a number on it in May 2026: “only 20 percent of moves in the fed funds rate transmit to the mortgage rate, while the corresponding number for the 10-year rate is 85 percent.” A Fed cut and a mortgage rate increase in the same week is not a contradiction. It is what happens when the Fed eases and long-term yields rise on the same news.
A tidy proof sits on this page already. In the week ending 6 August 2026 the average 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.69% while prime — the rate that does track fed funds — was 6.75%. On one chain, a long fixed loan cannot be cheaper than the short bank base rate.
Suppose the FOMC lowers the target range 0.25 point and banks post prime at 6.50%. The savings rate and 40% deposit beta below are illustrative assumptions, not predictions.
| What they hold | Before | After | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| HELOC, $40,000 drawn, prime + 1.00 | 7.75% → $3,100 | 7.50% → $3,000 | Saves $100 |
| Savings, $12,000, 40% deposit beta | 3.00% → $360 | 2.90% → $348 | Loses $12 |
| Mortgage, $250,000 30-year fixed | 6.69% | 6.69% | $0 |
Net effect: about $88 a year better off, arriving over several months, from a headline that said the Fed cut rates.
It flips with different balances. The same quarter point on a $150,000 HELOC is $375 a year; for a household with no variable debt and $60,000 in savings, the identical cut is a $60-a-year loss. Only your balances give the size, and the sign.
Why nothing happens when you expect it to
Every Fed official you will hear speak says monetary policy works with “long and variable lags.” The framing traces to Milton Friedman, working with Anna J. Schwartz, out of their historical studies of money and the business cycle — not a Federal Reserve slogan by origin, though the Fed has thoroughly adopted it.
How long? Nobody agrees, including the Fed
A May 2023 St. Louis Fed Regional Economist piece laid the disagreement out in the open. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic's view was that “it can take 18 months to two years or more for tighter monetary policy to materially affect inflation,” while Governor Christopher Waller argued that more recently “lags tend to be nine to 12 months.” Two senior officials of the same institution, the same year, roughly a factor of two apart. Friedman's own finding was about the spread rather than the length: the recorded lead “varied between 6 and 29 months at peaks and between 4 and 22 months at troughs.” The variability is the finding, which is why this page quotes a range and names the people instead of printing one number.
The chain moves at four speeds
- A day or two. Administered rates change on the effective date, the effective fed funds rate resettles at once, banks re-post prime.
- One or two statement cycles. Variable card APRs and HELOC rates.
- Months, incompletely. Deposit rates and savings APYs.
- Quarters to years, if at all. Hiring, business investment, rents and the inflation rate itself.
A rate decision is not an event with an outcome. It is one input whose effects arrive over a stretch of time nobody can specify in advance, mixed in with fiscal policy, energy prices and the labor market. Anyone who tells you confidently what a single decision will do to prices, and when, is claiming more precision than the institution making the decision claims for itself.
What's confirmed, what's convention, and what we couldn't trace
This page mixes hard primary-source facts with market habits that have no rule behind them. Here is which is which; every Confirmed row is linked in the sources below.
| Status | Claim | Establishing body |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmed | The FOMC sets a target range, not the rate. 3.50–3.75%, effective 11 Dec 2025. | FOMC implementation note, 10 Dec 2025 |
| Confirmed | EFFR is a volume-weighted median of overnight fed funds transactions on the FR 2420 report; 3.63% on 10 Aug 2026. | New York Fed; FRED; H.15 of 11 Aug 2026 |
| Confirmed | IORB 3.65%; ON RRP offering rate 3.50%, $160bn per-counterparty daily limit; primary credit 3.75%. | FOMC implementation note, 10 Dec 2025 |
| Confirmed | Reserve requirement ratios have been zero percent since 26 March 2020. | Federal Reserve Board |
| Confirmed | Twelve voting members: seven governors, the New York Fed president, four rotating presidents. Eight scheduled meetings a year. | federalreserve.gov |
| Confirmed | The mandate wording: “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.” | 12 U.S.C. § 225a |
| Confirmed | The 2% objective is measured on the PCE price index. Reaffirmed effective 27 January 2026. | FOMC Statement on Longer-Run Goals |
| Confirmed | SEP dots are individual assessments of appropriate policy, not a Committee decision. June 2026 median for 2026: 3.8%, range 3.4–4.4%. | Fed Guide to the SEP; June 2026 SEP |
| Confirmed | About 20% of a fed funds move transmits to the 30-year mortgage rate, against 85% for the 10-year yield. | Dallas Fed, 7 May 2026 |
| Confirmed | Deposit betas peaked near 60% in the 2004 cycle and stayed under 40% from 2015 to 2019. | New York Fed, Liberty Street Economics |
| Convention | Prime equals the top of the target range plus 3.00 points. Held at every move since Dec 2015, required by nothing. | Bank practice; no statute |
| Convention | Calling the target range “the Fed's interest rate,” quoting its midpoint as one number, and moving in 0.25-point steps. | Shorthand and practice, not rules |
| Convention | The margin added to prime on your card. Set by the issuer, nothing to do with the Fed. | Issuer pricing |
| Unverified | How long policy takes to affect inflation. Officials of the same institution gave estimates from nine months to over two years. | No settled figure exists |
| Unverified | Why the prime spread is three points, and why the ON RRP limit is $160 billion. Both figures are published; neither derivation is. | Not traced |
| Unverified | The common claim that banks trade fed funds to meet reserve requirements. Ratios are zero, and we found no current Fed statement naming a replacement rationale. | Stale explanation |
What trips people up
“The Fed set rates at 3.75%.” It set a range of 3.50% to 3.75%. The rate is 3.63%. Quoting the top of the range as the rate is off by 12 basis points and, worse, treats an announcement as a measurement.
“The Fed raised my credit card rate.” Four parties did. The FOMC moved its target range, the Board moved the administered rates so it stuck, banks re-posted prime, and your issuer's contract added the margin it assigned you years ago. Only that last party has a phone number you can call and paperwork you can read, which is the practical reason to keep the chain straight.
“The Fed cut, so mortgage rates are about to fall.” Roughly a fifth of a fed funds move reaches the 30-year mortgage rate, against 85% of a move in the 10-year Treasury yield. A cut on Wednesday and higher mortgage quotes on Friday is an ordinary week.
“The dot plot says the Fed will cut twice next year.” It says nothing about what the Fed will do. It is up to nineteen people's separate, individually conditional opinions about what would be appropriate, including participants with no vote this year. Taking a median of that and calling it a plan is the most common error in rate coverage.
“Rates went up, so my savings will pay more.” Some more, later, partly — deposit betas ran under 40% through the 2015–2019 cycle. Borrowing costs reprice within a statement; what you're paid reprices at the bank's convenience.
“CPI is 3.4%, so the Fed is 1.4 points off target.” The target is on PCE inflation from the BEA, not CPI from the BLS.
Assuming a rate change requires action from you. It might require none. Work out which accounts are actually indexed to prime, multiply each balance by the size of the move, and you have the real figure in dollars a year. Sometimes it is $88. Sometimes it is $600. The percentage on the news cannot tell you which.
Frequently asked questions
What is the federal funds rate?
It is the interest rate at which banks lend reserve balances to one another overnight, unsecured. Banks hold accounts at the Federal Reserve, and a bank with spare reserves can lend them to a bank that needs them until the next morning. Government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal Home Loan Banks also lend into this market. No consumer or small business ever borrows at this rate. It matters only because it is the shortest, safest dollar interest rate in the economy, so almost every other rate is priced above it.
Does the Federal Reserve set the federal funds rate?
No, and this is the most common error in rate coverage. The Federal Open Market Committee announces a target range for it, currently 3.50 to 3.75 percent. The rate that actually happens is the effective federal funds rate, a market outcome the New York Fed measures and publishes each morning. The Fed steers that market rate into its range using administered rates it does control: the interest it pays on reserve balances, the overnight reverse repo offering rate as a floor, and the discount window and Standing Repo Facility as a ceiling.
What is the federal funds rate right now?
The target range is 3.50 to 3.75 percent, effective 11 December 2025. The effective federal funds rate was 3.63 percent on 10 August 2026, per the Federal Reserve H.15 release published 11 August 2026 and FRED series EFFR. The related administered rates as of that date are interest on reserve balances at 3.65 percent, the overnight reverse repo offering rate at 3.50 percent, and the discount window primary credit rate at 3.75 percent. Because this can change on any decision date, check H.15 rather than trusting a number on any page, including this one.
What is the difference between the target range and the effective federal funds rate?
The target range is a policy announcement voted on by the FOMC. The effective federal funds rate is a measurement of what banks actually transacted at. The New York Fed calculates it as a volume-weighted median of overnight federal funds transactions reported on the FR 2420 Report of Selected Money Market Rates, and publishes it around 9 a.m. Eastern for the prior business day. A median rather than an average means a few unusual trades cannot drag the benchmark around. The Fed has published a range rather than a single point target since December 2008.
Does the federal funds rate affect mortgage rates?
Barely. A 30-year fixed mortgage is priced off long-term yields, principally the 10-year Treasury plus a spread that widens with interest rate volatility. Dallas Fed researchers estimated in May 2026 that only about 20 percent of a move in the fed funds rate transmits to the mortgage rate, against 85 percent for a move in the 10-year yield. That is why a Fed cut can coincide with mortgage rates rising. In the week ending 6 August 2026 the average 30-year fixed was 6.69 percent while the prime rate was 6.75 percent, which could not happen if they shared one chain.
What is the dot plot, and does it tell me what the Fed will do?
No. Four times a year the Fed publishes a Summary of Economic Projections whose best-known chart shows each participant's projection for the appropriate federal funds rate at the end of each year. The Fed's own footnote says each projection reflects that person's assessment of appropriate monetary policy. It is not a Committee decision, nobody votes on it, it includes participants who have no vote that year, and it commits nobody. In June 2026 the median dot for the end of 2026 was 3.8 percent while individual submissions ran from 3.4 to 4.4 percent.
Why does my savings rate move much less than my credit card rate?
Because the two links in the chain have very different strengths. A variable card or HELOC is contractually indexed to the prime rate, so it repriced automatically within a statement cycle or two of a Fed move. Deposit rates are set at the bank's discretion. New York Fed research measures the pass-through as a deposit beta and found cumulative betas peaking near 60 percent in the 2004 tightening cycle and never exceeding 40 percent from 2015 through 2019, concluding that peak betas have fallen by about 30 percent since the 2000s.
Related terms
Where to go next
- Watch the target range, the effective rate, inflation and labor data pulled live from federal sources in Markets · Economic.
- Learn how rates, central banks and bonds fit together in Economics for Traders — that's Stage 3 of five.
- See why a rate change does nothing to a fixed loan you already hold with the mortgage calculator — free, no account.
- Work through what compounding actually does in Stage 4 · Invest, free with no account.
- Browse every definition in Learn the Lingo.
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Implementation Note issued December 10, 2025 — the target range of 3-1/2 to 3-3/4 percent, IORB at 3.65%, the ON RRP offering rate at 3.50% with a $160 billion per-counterparty limit, the primary credit rate at 3.75%, and the Desk directive to purchase Treasury bills to maintain ample reserves.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Effective Federal Funds Rate and Repo and Reverse Repo Operations — EFFR as a volume-weighted median of FR 2420 transactions published each morning; the ON RRP floor, its eligible counterparties, and the Standing Repo Facility as a ceiling.
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, H.15 Selected Interest Rates, released 11 August 2026, and FRED series EFFR — federal funds effective 3.63%, bank prime loan 6.75% and primary credit 3.75% for 10 August 2026, plus the description of the federal funds market and its counterparties.
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, About the FOMC, Interest on Reserve Balances and Reserve Requirements — the twelve voting members and the four rotating groups, eight scheduled meetings a year, the 2006 and 2008 statutes authorizing IORB and its administration under Regulation D (12 CFR Part 204), and reserve requirement ratios of zero percent effective 26 March 2020.
- Federal Open Market Committee, Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy, reaffirmed effective 27 January 2026 — the 2 percent objective measured on the PCE price index, maximum employment as not directly measurable with no fixed numerical goal, and the balanced approach.
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections and the June 17, 2026 SEP — the SEP published four times a year by all participants, each projection conditional on that participant's own assessment of appropriate policy, and the June 2026 medians and ranges quoted here.
- Legal Information Institute, 12 U.S.C. § 225a — Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act, added 1977, naming maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.
- Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, What drives mortgage rates and their response to monetary policy changes, 7 May 2026, and Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey via FRED series MORTGAGE30US — roughly 20% of a fed funds move transmitting to the mortgage rate against 85% for the 10-year, and the 6.69% 30-year fixed average for the week ending 6 August 2026.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York, How Do Deposit Rates Respond to Monetary Policy?; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Examining Long and Variable Lags in Monetary Policy; BLS Consumer Price Index (released 12 August 2026) and BEA PCE Price Index (released 30 July 2026) — the deposit beta figures, the Friedman attribution and the Bostic and Waller lag estimates, and the CPI and PCE readings compared on this page.
The figures on this page are checked against the source that publishes them, and dated. Published rates move after the release named above — the linked source always carries the current number. This page explains a term; it does not recommend a product.