Method
Federal funds target range
The federal funds rate is the overnight rate banks charge each other for reserve balances. The Federal Open Market Committee does not set that rate as a single print. It sets a target range — a floor and a ceiling — and the New York Fed’s Desk operates to keep the effective overnight rate inside the band the Committee voted. A story that collapses the setting to one number has already dropped part of the decision. The object you can check is the range in the statement, the vote that adopted it, and the effective date for Desk operations. Those three things live in the decision document, not in a recap.
Explainer Reviewed 08-21-2026
What it is for
A reader uses the range to know the policy setting the Committee actually voted. When a headline says the Fed held, hiked, or cut, the checkable claim is whether that band moved, by what increment, and on which vote. Beginners and experienced readers need the same object: the range as written, not a single-number paraphrase. The range is also how you compare one meeting to the next. If the floor and ceiling are unchanged, the policy setting did not change, whatever else the surrounding language did. That is the job this note is for — naming the thing you would reopen.
What it cannot tell you
The range is not a forecast of the next meeting. It is not a market price and it is not an implied odds table. It is not a consumer-price print, an unemployment print, or the rate a household pays on a loan. Interest on reserve balances and the primary credit rate are related Board settings; they are not the funds-rate range itself, and they belong in a citation of their own when a story prints them. A single-number paraphrase (“the Fed is at X”) drops the fact that policy is a band. This note does not print a live range. The July hold story does, with the statement attached.
How to verify the object
The decision is in the FOMC statement, posted on the Federal Reserve’s monetary-policy press-release page the afternoon of a scheduled meeting. The target range is in the first policy paragraph. The vote and any named dissents follow. Minutes, posted later, do not replace the statement as the decision document. Do not invent an accession number. Open the statement for the meeting date you care about. If you need the later discussion, open the minutes of that same meeting and keep the two dates separate.