Fed Chair Semiannual Testimony: 2026 Schedule, Dates and What to Expect

The Fed Chair semiannual testimony is the twice-yearly appearance by the chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors before the US Congress to present the Federal Reserve’s Monetary Policy Report. The chair testifies once before the House Financial Services Committee and once, usually the following day, before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, taking several hours of questions from lawmakers on interest rates, inflation, jobs, bank regulation and the independence of the central bank. The next scheduled appearance is Wednesday, February 24, 2027 at 10:00 am ET (3:00 pm London), with the second round of the year set for July 14, 2027. The report itself is published by the Federal Reserve Board a few days before the hearing. Full schedule and background: Fed Chair semiannual testimony dates, where you can also subscribe to the ICS or Google Calendar feed for this page so each hearing lands in your own calendar automatically.

What are the upcoming testimony dates?

The Federal Reserve Act requires the Board to submit written reports on monetary policy twice a year, in February and July, and the chair appears alongside them. Committee chairs set the exact hearing dates, so times can shift by a day or two once the congressional calendar is finalised. The instances currently on the calendar are below.

Both hearings start at 10:00 am Washington time, which is 3:00 pm in London in February (when the US is on Eastern Standard Time) and 3:00 pm in London in July as well, because the UK and the US both observe summer time by then. In central Europe that is 4:00 pm, and in Tokyo it is the small hours of the following morning, which is why Asian markets often react to the headlines when they open rather than in real time.

What is the Fed Chair semiannual testimony?

The hearings are often still called the “Humphrey-Hawkins” testimony, after the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 that originally mandated them. That specific requirement lapsed in 2000, but Congress kept the practice alive through the Federal Reserve Act, so the chair continues to appear twice a year. The purpose is democratic accountability: the Federal Reserve sets interest rates without needing approval from the White House or Congress, and in exchange it must explain itself in public.

Each appearance has three parts. First, the Board publishes the Monetary Policy Report, a detailed document on the state of the economy, inflation, the labour market, financial conditions and the Fed’s own policy framework. Second, the chair reads a short opening statement, typically five to ten minutes, which is released on the Federal Reserve website at the moment delivery begins. Third, and most important for markets, comes the question-and-answer session, which can run for two to three hours.

The opening statement is written, checked and usually cautious. The answers are not. Traders watch the Q&A because lawmakers push the chair on things a policy statement would never address directly: whether the next move is a rise or a cut, how tolerant the committee is of inflation above target, how the Fed views government borrowing, and how it would respond to political pressure. A single sentence in an unscripted answer can move the entire US interest rate curve.

The current chair is Kevin Warsh, who took office on May 13, 2026 and gave his first semiannual testimony on July 14 and 15, 2026. He has said publicly that he intends to communicate less through forward guidance, the practice of signalling the likely path of rates in advance, than his predecessors did. If that holds, the congressional hearings become relatively more important, because they are one of the few occasions when the chair must answer questions for hours in public.

How is the testimony prepared and decided?

The Monetary Policy Report is produced by Federal Reserve Board staff and approved by the Board of Governors. It is not a forecast document in the way the quarterly Summary of Economic Projections is, but it does contain the staff’s analysis of inflation, employment, wages, credit conditions and financial stability, plus special boxes on topics the Board wants to highlight. The report released on July 10, 2026, ahead of Chairman Warsh’s first appearance, gave unusual prominence to money supply dynamics, according to contemporaneous reporting.

Monetary policy itself is decided not by the chair alone but by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which currently comprises the seven Board governors and five of the twelve Reserve Bank presidents on a rotating basis, with the president of the New York Fed always voting. The chair speaks for the committee, so testimony language tends to track the most recent FOMC statement. Where the chair goes beyond it, markets treat that as new information.

The hearing schedule is set by the two committees, not by the Fed. That means dates can be confirmed relatively late, and occasionally the House and Senate sessions are separated by more than one day. The written testimony is identical for both chambers; only the questions differ.

What time is it released and where?

Hearings normally begin at 10:00 am ET, which is 3:00 pm in London, 4:00 pm in Frankfurt and Paris, 11:00 pm in Tokyo and midnight in Sydney. The written opening statement is posted on the Federal Reserve Board’s testimony page as delivery starts, and the full Monetary Policy Report is published on the Board’s Monetary Policy Report page a few days earlier, usually on the Friday before the first hearing.

There is no market embargo in the way there is for economic data releases, because the event is a live public hearing. The report, however, is released at a fixed time and is treated as material information until then. Live video is carried by the committees themselves, by the Federal Reserve’s own webcast page for the chair’s statement, and by C-SPAN. Transcripts of questions and answers are not published instantly, so the fastest reliable record of the Q&A is the live feed.

A practical point for readers outside the US: because the Q&A can run until early afternoon in Washington, headlines keep arriving after the London close. That is one reason the sharpest moves in European assets are often seen the following morning rather than on the day.

Recent appearances

Source: Federal Reserve Board testimony archive and the Board’s Monetary Policy Report page. The Federal Reserve publishes every opening statement going back decades, so earlier appearances by Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan can be read in full on the same site. Greenspan appeared before Congress more than two hundred times, a figure Chairman Warsh cited in his July 2026 statement.

Context for the next hearing: the FOMC voted 9-3 on July 29, 2026 to keep the federal funds target range at 3.50% to 3.75%, where it had been all year, with three members preferring an immediate 25 basis point increase. A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so 25bp is 0.25%. Minutes of that meeting, released on August 19, 2026, showed some participants saw a rise as necessary if inflation did not cool. That balance of risks, a Fed debating tightening rather than easing, is what makes the February 2027 testimony worth watching.

What is the consensus forecast?

Testimony is not a data release, so there is no consensus number in the way there is for inflation or payrolls. What markets price instead is the probability of a change in the federal funds rate at upcoming FOMC meetings, visible through futures-based measures such as the CME FedWatch tool, and they judge the testimony against that pricing. A consensus forecast for the February 24, 2027 hearing has not yet been published.

The practical yardstick is simple. If the chair’s language on inflation is firmer than the last FOMC statement, markets read it as hawkish, meaning more likely to raise rates or hold them higher for longer. If the emphasis shifts towards the labour market or growth risks, it reads as dovish, meaning more inclined to cut. Chairman Warsh’s July 2026 statement leaned firmly towards price stability, telling lawmakers the committee had “no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation”.

How do markets react?

Reactions are usually smaller than on FOMC decision days but larger than on an average speech, and they build through the Q&A rather than arriving in one spike. Typical channels:

• Short-dated Treasuries. Two-year yields are the cleanest read on rate expectations. Hawkish testimony pushes them up, dovish testimony pulls them down.
• The dollar. Higher expected US rates tend to lift the dollar against the euro, the pound and the yen, which matters for anyone paying for imports or holding overseas investments.
• Equities. Rate-sensitive sectors, notably technology and property, respond most, because their valuations depend heavily on discount rates.
• Gold and crypto. Both are sensitive to real interest rates and to the perceived independence of the central bank, a recurring theme in recent hearings.

Spillovers are global. When US rate expectations rise, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank do not automatically follow, but sterling and euro bond yields usually drift in sympathy, and emerging market currencies come under pressure as dollar funding costs rise. Asian markets typically price the move at the next open, given the time difference.

Two caveats. First, a chair determined to avoid forward guidance can deliver a hearing that moves nothing at all. Second, much of the questioning covers bank supervision, housing supply, stablecoins and the Fed’s own governance, subjects that matter politically but rarely move rates. The market-relevant content is often a handful of sentences in three hours.

What It Means for Your Money

The chair does not change any interest rate while sitting at a hearing table. What changes is the market’s expectation of where rates go next, and expectations feed into prices you actually pay.

• Mortgages. In the US, fixed mortgage rates track longer-dated bond yields, so hawkish testimony can nudge the cost of a new 30-year loan higher within days. In the UK, fixed-rate deals are priced off swap rates, which take their cue partly from US yields, so a hawkish Fed can make British fixes marginally more expensive even when the Bank of England has not moved.
• Savings. If the testimony makes a rate rise look more likely, banks and money market funds may hold deposit rates higher for longer. That helps savers and hurts borrowers on variable rates.
• Jobs and prices. A chair emphasising inflation above employment is signalling a willingness to accept slower hiring to bring prices down. Over a year or two, that shows up in the labour market before it shows up in shop prices.
• Pensions and investments. Bond funds fall when yields rise and rise when yields fall, so testimony affects the fixed income part of a pension immediately. Global equity funds are exposed through the dollar as well as through share prices.
• Currency. A stronger dollar makes US holidays, dollar-priced goods and imported energy more expensive for anyone earning in pounds or euros, and flatters the sterling value of US shares already held.

For most people the sensible response is none at all. These hearings are a read on direction, not a trigger for changing a mortgage, a pension allocation or a savings plan. They are most useful if you are about to fix a mortgage, lock in a savings rate, or convert a large sum between currencies in the following few weeks.

Related economic events

• US CPI Report: the monthly inflation reading that shapes the questions lawmakers ask.
• US Jobs Report: monthly payrolls and unemployment, the other half of the Fed’s dual mandate.
• US PCE Report: the inflation measure the FOMC formally targets at 2%.
• US GDP Report: quarterly growth, the backdrop to any discussion of how restrictive policy is.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the next Fed Chair semiannual testimony?

The next scheduled appearance is February 24, 2027, followed by July 14, 2027. Exact hearing dates are set by the House and Senate committees and can shift by a day or two.

What time does the testimony start?

Hearings normally begin at 10:00 am ET, which is 3:00 pm in London and 4:00 pm in central Europe. The chair’s written opening statement is published as delivery begins.

How often does the Fed Chair testify to Congress?

Twice a year on monetary policy, in February and July, once before each chamber. The chair also appears at other hearings from time to time, but those are not part of the semiannual cycle.

Where can I find the official statement and report?

On the Federal Reserve Board website: the Monetary Policy Report is on the Board’s monetary policy publications page, and the opening statement appears in the testimony section on the day of the hearing.

Does the testimony change interest rates?

No. Rates are set by the FOMC at its scheduled meetings. The testimony can change what markets expect the FOMC to do, which is why bond yields and the dollar often move during the question-and-answer session.