FOMC Minutes: 2026 Schedule, Dates and What to Expect

The FOMC minutes are the detailed written record of each Federal Open Market Committee meeting, published by the Federal Reserve Board roughly three weeks after the interest rate decision itself. The next release covers the September 2026 meeting and is due on Wednesday, October 7, 2026 at 2:00 pm ET, which is 7:00 pm in London, 8:00 pm in Frankfurt and 3:00 am on October 8 in Tokyo. Minutes are published eight times a year, matching the eight scheduled FOMC meetings, and they are one of the few documents that show how divided or united the committee really was. This page carries the full confirmed schedule below, and the ICS and Google Calendar feed on this page lets you add every release date to your own diary so the 2:00 pm publication does not catch you mid-trade.

Minutes matter because the policy statement released on decision day runs to a few hundred words, while the minutes run to thousands. They show the range of views, the arguments made for and against action, the staff’s economic and financial outlook, and any discussion of the Fed’s balance sheet. For anyone trying to work out where interest rates go next, and therefore what happens to mortgage costs, savings rates and the dollar, the minutes are the closest thing to a transcript of the debate.

2026 and 2027 schedule

The table below lists every confirmed FOMC minutes release date. Each publication refers to the meeting held approximately three weeks earlier: the October 7, 2026 minutes cover the September 2026 meeting, the November 18, 2026 minutes cover the late October meeting, and so on. All releases are at 2:00 pm in Washington, with the London equivalent shifting by an hour when US and UK clocks change at different times.

Source: Federal Reserve Board FOMC calendar. Dates are set well in advance and rarely move, but the Fed reserves the right to change them, and unscheduled meetings produce their own minutes on the same three-week rule.

What are the FOMC minutes?

The Federal Open Market Committee, usually shortened to FOMC, is the body inside the US Federal Reserve that sets the federal funds rate, the overnight interest rate that anchors borrowing costs across the American economy and, indirectly, much of the world. It has 12 voting members: the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board, the president of the New York Fed, and four of the remaining 11 regional Reserve Bank presidents on a rotating annual basis. All 19 policymakers attend and speak, whether or not they hold a vote that year.

On decision day the committee publishes a short statement and, four times a year, a Summary of Economic Projections showing where each participant expects growth, unemployment, inflation and interest rates to go. The minutes, published three weeks later, fill in everything the statement leaves out. They summarise the staff’s review of financial and economic conditions, then set out participants’ views in a carefully graded language of consensus: “all”, “almost all”, “most”, “many”, “several”, “some”, “a few” and “a couple”. Traders read those words closely, because a shift from “a few” to “several” participants favouring a rate move is a genuine signal about the balance of opinion.

The minutes are not a transcript. Full transcripts of FOMC meetings are released only after five years, which is why the minutes remain the most timely inside view of the debate. They are also not the place where policy changes: the decision has already been announced and, in most cases, several weeks of speeches and data have followed. What the minutes add is depth, nuance and, occasionally, a surprise, such as a discussion of the balance sheet or of the meeting calendar itself that markets had not priced in.

The current backdrop makes the minutes unusually interesting. The committee has held its target range at 3.50% to 3.75% through the middle of 2026, and at the July 28 to 29, 2026 meeting it did so on a 9-3 vote, with three members dissenting in favour of a quarter-point increase, according to CNBC and Charles Schwab. Chair Kevin Warsh has said publicly that he intends to offer less forward guidance than his predecessors, which raises the value of the minutes as a source of information about the committee’s thinking.

How are the minutes prepared and decided?

The minutes are drafted by the Fed’s staff secretariat immediately after the meeting, circulated to all participants for comment and correction, and formally approved by the committee at its following meeting. Because approval comes later, the published version is technically a draft record, but the text is settled and the Fed treats it as final for publication purposes. The Fed has followed the three-week publication rule since 2005; before that the wait was around six weeks, which made the document far less useful to markets.

Two features are worth understanding. First, the minutes describe economic and financial conditions as they were known at the time of the meeting, not at the time of publication. If inflation or payrolls data have moved sharply in the intervening three weeks, parts of the document may already be out of date, and experienced readers discount it accordingly. Second, the minutes contain no attributed quotations. Individual names appear only in the record of the vote and in the description of dissents, so the interpretive work lies in matching the anonymous camps described in the text to the public speeches of known policymakers.

The minutes also record any votes on administrative matters, changes to the interest on reserve balances rate, decisions on the pace of balance sheet runoff, and discussions of the Fed’s operating framework. Occasionally the document reveals procedural debates: the July 28 to 29, 2026 minutes recorded that the Chairman raised the idea of moving to six scheduled meetings a year, held roughly every two months, and asked the committee for input, with no decisions taken.

What time are the minutes released and where?

Minutes are published at 2:00 pm Eastern Time, the same hour of day as an FOMC decision. In practical terms that means:

• Washington and New York: 2:00 pm ET
• London: 7:00 pm during US daylight time, 6:00 pm in the winter months when both zones are on standard time
• Frankfurt and Paris: 8:00 pm during US daylight time, 7:00 pm in winter
• Tokyo and Sydney: the following morning, so Asian markets react at their open rather than in real time

The text appears on the Federal Reserve Board website, in the monetary policy section, alongside a press release. There is no lock-up or embargoed early access for journalists in the way there is for some statistical releases, so the entire market receives the document simultaneously. Because the release lands in the final two hours of the New York trading session, the reaction is compressed and can be sharp, particularly in Treasury futures and the dollar.

Full schedule and background for the wider Fed calendar, including decision dates and press conferences, sits alongside the data releases that shape those decisions: the US CPI report dates and the US jobs report dates.

Recent releases and decisions

The table below shows the most recent minutes published by the Federal Reserve and the policy setting they described. The target range has been unchanged at 3.50% to 3.75% through this run of meetings.

Sources: Federal Reserve Board minutes and press releases; vote detail as reported by CNBC and Charles Schwab. A basis point, or bp, is one hundredth of a percentage point, so 25bp is 0.25%.

How do markets react to the minutes?

The reaction is usually smaller than on decision day, because the decision is already known, but it is far from trivial. The channels are consistent:

• Short-dated Treasuries and rate futures. Two-year yields and federal funds futures move first, because they price the expected path of policy over the next year or two. Traders watch the implied odds in the CME FedWatch tool, which translates futures prices into probabilities of a hike, hold or cut at the next meeting. Ahead of the July 2026 decision, FedWatch showed roughly a one-in-three chance of a surprise increase, according to CNBC, and the minutes three weeks later were read for whether that risk was building.
• The dollar. Language read as hawkish, meaning leaning towards higher rates or slower cuts, tends to support the dollar against the euro, sterling and the yen. Dovish language, meaning leaning towards lower rates, tends to weaken it. Sterling and euro traders care because a stronger dollar raises the cost of dollar-priced imports, including energy, for the UK and the euro area.
• Equities. Rate-sensitive sectors move most: technology and growth stocks with long-dated cash flows, plus housebuilders and banks. Because the release is at 2:00 pm ET, moves often extend into the close.
• Gold and emerging markets. Both are sensitive to real US yields, so a hawkish set of minutes typically weighs on gold and on emerging market currencies that borrow in dollars.

The biggest reactions come when the minutes contradict the impression left by the press conference, or when they reveal a debate markets had not anticipated: a discussion of the balance sheet, of the neutral rate, or of the number of participants who saw a case for moving at the meeting itself. When the minutes simply confirm what the chair has already said in public, the market response can be close to nil.

What It Means for Your Money

The FOMC minutes do not change any interest rate on the day they are published. What they do is shift expectations, and expectations are what actually set the prices you pay and receive.

Mortgages and loans. In the United States, fixed mortgage rates track long-term Treasury yields rather than the Fed’s overnight rate, and those yields move on the outlook for policy. Minutes that make a rate increase look more likely tend to push 30-year mortgage quotes higher within days. In the UK and Europe the link is indirect but real: global bond markets move together, so US-driven yield moves feed into UK gilt yields and therefore into fixed-rate mortgage pricing, even though the Bank of England sets Bank Rate independently.

Savings. Easy-access and notice account rates follow the central bank’s policy rate closely. If the minutes point to rates staying higher for longer, savers keeping cash in short-term deposits and money market funds continue to earn more, and locking money away in a long fixed-term bond becomes less attractive. If they point to cuts, the opposite applies, and fixing sooner can be worth considering.

Jobs and prices. The minutes describe how policymakers read the labour market and inflation. A committee worried about inflation is a committee willing to accept slower hiring and weaker wage growth to bring price rises down. A committee worried about employment is more likely to tolerate inflation slightly above target. Either bias eventually shows up in job security, pay settlements and the prices in the shops.

Pensions and investments. Anyone with a workplace pension or an index fund holds bonds and shares whose values respond to the expected path of US rates. Higher-for-longer expectations reduce bond prices and tend to compress valuations for growth stocks; expectations of cuts do the reverse. Because US equities make up the majority of most global index funds, a Fed-driven move in New York shows up in a UK or European pension statement within days.

The pound, dollar and euro. Currency moves triggered by the minutes affect holiday money, imported goods and the sterling value of overseas investments. A stronger dollar makes US travel and dollar-priced subscriptions more expensive for UK and European households, while flattering the returns on unhedged US holdings.

The practical takeaway for a household is not to trade the release but to use it as a temperature check. If successive sets of minutes show a committee leaning towards higher rates, that is a reason to lock in savings rates less aggressively and to treat cheap borrowing as unlikely to return soon.

Related economic events

• US CPI Report: the monthly consumer price index, the single most important inflation input into FOMC discussions.
• US Jobs Report: monthly non-farm payrolls and unemployment, the other half of the Fed’s dual mandate.
• US PCE Report: the personal consumption expenditures price index, the inflation measure the Fed formally targets at 2%.
• US GDP Report: quarterly growth, which shapes the staff outlook summarised in every set of minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

When are the next FOMC minutes released?

The next release is on Wednesday, October 7, 2026 at 2:00 pm ET, 7:00 pm in London, covering the September 2026 FOMC meeting. The following release is scheduled for November 18, 2026.

What time are FOMC minutes published?

Always 2:00 pm Eastern Time, which is 7:00 pm in London during US daylight saving time and 6:00 pm in London during the winter months. There is no early access, so all market participants see the document at the same moment.

How often are the FOMC minutes published?

Eight times a year, three weeks after each scheduled FOMC policy meeting. Any unscheduled or emergency meeting also produces minutes, published on the same three-week timetable.

Where can I read the official release?

On the Federal Reserve Board website in the monetary policy section, linked from the FOMC calendar page, which also lists every future meeting and minutes date.

Do the minutes change interest rates?

No. The rate decision was made and announced three weeks earlier. The minutes change expectations about future decisions, which is why bond yields, the dollar and equities can still move on publication.