What Are the FOMC Minutes, and What Do They Show?

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is the group at the Federal Reserve that votes on US interest rates. It published the minutes of its 15–16 September 2026 meeting on 7 October 2026. At that meeting it raised interest rates. The statement it released on 16 September ran to 131 words. The minutes run to about 5,300.

This guide explains what the minutes are, when they come out and what each part holds. It then sets the September 2026 minutes against that statement, to show what the minutes add.

The Federal Reserve's own answer is on its page of frequently asked questions. The Fed calls the FOMC "the Committee". This guide does the same.

The minutes "provide a timely summary of the discussion during the meeting and the decisions taken at the meeting". They also "explain the reasons for the Committee's decisions".

The minutes are an official record. They "identify all attendees" and give "a complete record of policy actions taken, including the votes by individual members".

The statement and the minutes do different jobs. A Fed staff note from 2015 quotes Chairman Bernanke telling the Committee in 2006 that the statement "represents something closer to a consensus or median view of the Committee". The minutes, he said, "try to express the range of views and discussion around the table".

We read the statement line by line in how to read an FOMC statement. This guide is about the other document.

The Fed's calendar says the minutes of regularly scheduled meetings "are released three weeks after the date of the policy decision". The September 2026 decision came on Wednesday 16 September. The minutes came out at 2:00 pm US Eastern time on Wednesday 7 October.

Since 2005 the minutes have come three weeks after each meeting. From 1993 to the end of 2004, the minutes of a meeting were released after the next meeting.

The chart counts the days from the decision to the release of the minutes for the 46 meetings on the Fed's calendar from January 2021 to September 2026. A gap of 21 days applies to 43 of them.

Three came sooner: 20 days for the 31 October to 1 November 2023 meeting, 19 days for 6–7 November 2024 and 20 days for 9–10 December 2025.

The Committee approves the minutes before release. The September 2026 minutes record that it approved the July minutes by notation vote, which is a vote taken without a meeting, on 18 August 2026. Those were released the next day.

The most detailed record is the transcript. The Fed releases transcripts after an interval of about five years.

The September 2026 minutes start with 58 words of opening lines. Six headed parts follow, then a notation vote and the attendance list. The chart shows how many words each holds, against the statement. Its last bar joins the notation vote and the attendance list.

The first headed part reports on financial markets. It comes from the Manager of the System Open Market Account, the official who manages the Fed's portfolio of securities. The Manager also reports on the Fed's own market operations. The Committee votes to ratify those operations.

Three parts follow from the Fed's staff: a review of the economy, a review of financial conditions and the staff's outlook. The longest part, at 1,603 words, is what the participants said. The last headed part holds the policy directive, the text of the statement and the vote.

The minutes use two words for people. Members are the 12 people who vote on the Committee. Participants are the members plus the Reserve Bank presidents who do not vote.

The participants' part reports participants. The policy part reports members. We cover who votes in what the FOMC is.

The minutes do not say who held a view. They say how many held it, with counting words. The 2015 Fed staff note quoted earlier lists those words from largest to smallest: "all", "all but one", "almost all", "most", "many", "several", "few" and "a couple". It adds "some" and "a number of" as words also used with some frequency.

The note gives an order. It gives no number for any word.

The chart counts the phrases in the participants' part of the September 2026 minutes. "Several participants" appears 12 times and "some participants" 9 times. "A few participants" appears 6 times.

"All but one" is also on the Fed note's list. It does not appear in this part, so the chart has no bar for it.

The part also uses "participants generally" 8 times, with no count word. "A majority of participants" appears once and is not on the chart, because the Fed note does not list it. Neither "several" nor "a few" says how many of the participants held the view.

The statement of 16 September gave the decision, the vote count and three short paragraphs. The decision was to raise the target range for the Fed Funds Rate by 0.25 percentage points. The new range is 3.75% to 4%.

The Fed Funds Rate is the interest rate that banks charge one another for overnight loans. The target range is the band in which the Committee aims to keep that rate.

The minutes add four things.

The names behind the vote. The statement gives a count of 12 to 0. The minutes list the 12 members who voted for the rise, from Kevin Warsh to Christopher Waller. They also record "Voting against this action: None".

The reasoning. The statement says the action "will support a timelier return to the Committee's 2 percent goal". The minutes say many participants "emphasized that a higher path for the target range would be prudent on risk-management grounds". A number of participants viewed a higher path as necessary on their most likely outlook for the economy.

The path ahead. The statement says nothing about later meetings. The minutes record that "most participants assessed that another increase in the target range for the federal funds rate would likely be appropriate by year end". They add that participants approached each meeting with an open mind and that "decisions at future meetings would depend on incoming information".

The year-end assessment records a view held at the meeting. It is not a decision. It gives a timeframe, by year end, but names no meeting.

The balance sheet. The statement has one sentence on maintaining ample reserves. The minutes add that the Desk, which carries out the Fed's market operations, had paused its reserve management purchases. These are purchases of Treasury bills to keep the supply of bank reserves ample.

The minutes are a summary. They are not a transcript. They leave out who said what.

They describe the economy as the staff and participants saw it on 15–16 September.

The Fed's policy on external communications asks participants to refrain from characterising the discussion "beyond what has been published in the minutes". The minutes mark the limit of what participants say about the Committee's discussion. A second rule limits what they say in the days around each meeting. We explain it in the Fed blackout period.

The minutes are the Committee's own record of a meeting, released three weeks later. They add the votes by name, the reasons and the range of views that the statement leaves out.

This explainer is part of the YX Insights Academy. Each one takes a single idea and checks it against real data.

The same approach runs through everything else we publish:

Good places to start on the website:

The FOMC minutes are released three weeks after each policy decision. The minutes of the 15–16 September 2026 meeting came out at 2:00 pm US Eastern time on 7 October 2026, 21 days after the decision. The FOMC meeting schedule explains the cycle.

The statement is a short text released on decision day with the decision and the vote count. The minutes come three weeks later and record the discussion, the reasons and each member's vote. The September 2026 statement ran to 131 words and the minutes to about 5,300.

No. They name the members who voted and everyone who attended. They report views by count, with words such as "several" and "a few". No participant is named beside a view.

The minutes are published on the Federal Reserve Board's website, federalreserve.gov. The FOMC calendars page lists every meeting from 2021 onwards, with links to the statement, the press conference and the minutes.

Yes, but late. The FOMC releases the transcript of a meeting after an interval of about five years. The transcript is the most detailed record of the meeting. The minutes are the summary released three weeks after it.

DISCLAIMER: This article is strictly educational. Any information or analysis in this note is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Nothing in this note is intended to be investment advice and nor should it be relied upon to make investment decisions. Any opinions, analyses, or probabilities expressed in this note are those of the author as of the note's date of publication and are subject to change without notice.