FOMC Meeting Calendar: Fed Decision Dates and Times

The Federal Open Market Committee meets eight times a year, on dates the Federal Reserve publishes more than a year in advance. Each scheduled meeting ends with a rate decision released at 2:00 PM Eastern Time, followed by the Chair’s press conference half an hour later. This page tracks every scheduled meeting, flags the four that carry new economic projections, and counts down to the next decision.

All scheduled FOMC meetings

The Committee meets roughly every six weeks, over two days, with the policy statement released on the second day. The Federal Reserve publishes the full schedule for the following year and keeps a tentative calendar one further year out; each date remains provisional until it is confirmed at the meeting immediately before it, although in practice the published schedule almost never moves.

How a meeting unfolds

A scheduled meeting follows a fixed sequence. The statement and the target-range decision are released at 2:00 PM ET on the second day, the press conference starts at 2:30 PM ET, and the minutes follow about three weeks later. Four meetings a year — March, June, September and December — also include the Summary of Economic Projections, whose dot plot maps each participant’s anonymous view of where the policy rate should sit at the end of the current year, over the next two years and in the longer run.

The Committee is not bound by its calendar. It can hold unscheduled meetings and move rates between scheduled dates when conditions demand it, as it did twice in March 2020. That remains a rare event — but it is worth keeping in mind before reading the schedule as a promise.

What a decision changes — and what it does not

A decision day moves markets through expectations more than through the rate itself. By the time the statement is released, futures markets have usually priced the most likely outcome; what tends to move prices is the gap between the decision, the tone of the statement and the projections. Holding rates unchanged is a decision too, and some of the sharpest market reactions of recent cycles have followed meetings where the rate did not move but the dot plot did.

The mechanics through which a policy rate propagates to credit, corporate earnings and asset prices run on a slower clock than the announcement — a transmission measured in quarters, not headlines. That machinery is covered in depth across the monetary regimes and interest rates pillar, and the underlying series are available in the research data hub.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated — 29 July 2026