The Federal Reserve has unveiled its revised schedule of monetary policy meetings for 2027, confirming that policymakers will vote on interest rates only seven times next year — the first change to a calendar that has run at eight rate-setting meetings a year since 1981.
Under the new timetable, published by the Fed on Thursday, the meeting set for October 26–27, 2027 will be given over entirely to a discussion of broad monetary policy strategy. There will be no vote on the federal funds rate and no policy statement after it, the Fed said.
The final rate-setting meeting of 2027 will now be held on November 16–17, rather than on December 7–8 as originally scheduled. After that, officials will not meet again until January 25–26, 2028, leaving a full two-month gap between decisions at the turn of the year. Chair Kevin Warsh has said he expects the pattern to go further in 2028, with two strategy meetings and only six for setting policy.
Warsh, who took over as Fed chair in May, argues that the slower cadence will give policymakers two months of economic data to assess between meetings and more time to consider longer-term questions. “I expect that in 2028, we’ll have two meetings dedicated to discussions of strategy and six for setting policy,” he said at his press conference on October 28, when he first announced the change after the Fed held its benchmark rate at 3.75% to 4.00%.
The new schedule also quietly drops another of the Fed’s long-standing practices. On the updated list of meetings, those in March, June and September 2027 are no longer marked as gatherings at which officials submit their quarterly economic projections. Warsh is known to be disdainful of the projections exercise — begun under former Chair Ben Bernanke — and has not submitted projections of his own since becoming Fed leader. He has set up a task force to review the Fed’s communications practices and strategy, including whether to continue publishing the so-called dot plot of policymaker projections. That panel has not yet delivered its findings.
The next rate decision comes at the Fed’s December meeting, where officials will weigh whether to raise borrowing costs again after a run of hot inflation data.
Sources: Reuters, “Fed sets new meeting schedule for 2027, as foretold by Warsh” — https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fed-sets-new-meeting-schedule-2027-foretold-by-warsh-2026-11-12/
