September 2026 Fed Meeting: Dates, Hike Odds, and the Six Events That Land First

TL;DR

• The next FOMC meeting is Tuesday and Wednesday, September 15-16, 2026. The decision lands Wednesday, September 16 at 2:00pm ET, with Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference at 2:30pm and a fresh Summary of Economic Projections alongside.
• The question is a hike, not a cut. The target range sits at 3.50-3.75% after a July hold on a 9-3 vote, with three officials preferring a quarter-point increase.
• Market pricing puts a September hike near 30%, down from almost 58% just after the July meeting, after payrolls fell 23,000, CPI matched forecasts and retail sales broke.
• Six scheduled events land before the vote: the July minutes, July PCE, Warsh at Jackson Hole, the August jobs report, August PPI and August CPI. The last one, September 11, is five days before the decision.
• This page is the hub for the decision. It gets updated as each event lands.

When Is the September 2026 Fed Meeting?

September 15-16, 2026, per the Federal Reserve's meeting calendar. The statement publishes at 2:00pm ET on Wednesday the 16th, Warsh takes questions at 2:30pm, and this is a projections meeting, so the dot plot and the committee's economic forecasts publish with it. The previous set of projections dates to June; September's will be the first to show where the committee thinks rates finish 2026 since the mandate split open over the summer.

What Are the Odds of a September Hike?

Roughly 30%, about one in three. The path there tells you more than the level. Hike odds sat near 58% just after the July 28-29 meeting, where the committee held at 3.50-3.75% and three officials, Hammack, Kashkari and Logan, dissented in favour of a hike, the first triple dissent in one direction since September 2016.

Then the data went one way. July payrolls fell 23,000. July CPI came in at 3.4%, matching forecasts and settling nothing. July PPI was flat. Retail sales fell 0.6% against a positive consensus, and consumer sentiment printed 51.0. Each print took a few points off the hike, and pricing has drifted from a coin flip to about a third.

A third is not nothing. The committee that meets in September is the same one that produced three dissents into softer data than this, and inflation is still 3.4% against a 2% target with a war premium in the pipeline. The hawks have not conceded; they have been outvoted by the calendar so far.

What Has to Happen Before the Decision

Six scheduled events, in order. Each one moves the September pricing before the committee sees a single vote.

• August 19: the July FOMC minutes at 2:00pm ET. The record of the meeting with the three dissents. The count to watch is how many non-voters leaned the same way.
• August 26: July PCE at 8:30am ET, the Fed's own inflation gauge, on a day it shares with Nvidia earnings.
• August 28: Warsh's first Jackson Hole keynote as chair, Friday morning. His first scheduled chance to bless or push back on the market's repricing.
• September 4: the August jobs report at 8:30am ET. July went negative; a second negative print makes the labour half of the mandate very hard to hike into.
• September 10: August PPI at 8:30am ET, per the BLS release schedule.
• September 11: August CPI at 8:30am ET. Five days before the vote, and the print this site has argued decides it: an in-line July settled nothing, so the tiebreak falls to August.

My read of the sequencing: the minutes and Jackson Hole set the tone, but the jobs report and CPI are the only two entries on that list that can actually move a vote. If both come in soft, the hike migrates to the October and December meetings, or dies. If payrolls stabilise and CPI re-accelerates, 30% is too low, and the September meeting becomes live in a way the market has stopped pricing.

The Board

Six events, one vote. The last data point lands five days before the decision.

The One-Line Read

The Fed decides on September 16 at 2:00pm ET with a hike priced near one in three: the August jobs report and the August CPI are the two prints that can move that number, and everything else is commentary.