Stats › Valuation › Fed funds rate
The federal funds rate
The federal funds rate is the rate at which banks lend reserves to each other overnight. That sounds narrow and technical, and it is, but it sits underneath everything else. It's the shortest rate in the system, and every other rate in the economy is priced off it plus something for time and something for credit risk. Move it and you have moved the price of every future dollar.
This page tracks where the rate is now, how it got here, and the two extremes that bracket the whole series: a monthly average of 22.36% in July 1981 and 0.04% in December 2011. More than twenty two percentage points of range. No other single input into what a share is worth has moved that far. I put the page together because the rate tends to get discussed as though it were news, when what actually matters is the level and the direction over years rather than what happens at any one meeting.
There's a section on 1981 in particular, because the long fall from there to 2011 is the backdrop to nearly every long run return figure you will ever see quoted. Two sources, both linked at the bottom with their dates. Go and look at the history yourself. It's a short read and it changes how the historical averages feel.
The federal funds target range was 3.5% to 3.75% as of 29 July 2026, following six cuts between September 2024 and December 2025 and then five consecutive holds through the first seven months of 2026. The all time high was a monthly average of 22.36% in July 1981 and the low 0.04% in December 2011. That range of more than twenty two percentage points is the widest of any single input into equity valuation.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 2 named sources, roughly 1300 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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