The Federal Open Market Committee is made up of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the presidents of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, nineteen people around the table when every seat is filled. Only twelve of them cast a vote at any given meeting.

The other seven are not silent. They take part in the discussion, argue their case, and can shape the outcome even without a vote that day. What changes is which twelve hold the vote, and that lineup is reset every January.

Why the seats are shared out at all

The arrangement keeps the vote from resting permanently with the same regional banks. A rotation spreads the voting seat around the Reserve Bank presidents over time, so the twelve who decide policy in a given year are not always the same twelve. For the full structure of the Committee, including the Board of Governors and how the regional banks fit around it, see The Federal Reserve: Who Decides What.

The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks do not all get a vote at the same time. Instead, four of them share three voting seats on a rotating basis, so that each bank returns to the table on a fixed cycle.

How the four groups are arranged

The rotation splits the eleven non-New York regional banks into four groups, weighted roughly by the size and character of their districts, and each group holds one voting seat that its members take in turn, one year at a time. A regional bank's president votes in the year their group's turn comes round, then steps back to alternate status until the cycle returns to them.

Why New York never rotates out

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds a permanent vote on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the group of Board members and regional bank presidents that sets the target range for the federal funds rate. New York carries out the market operations that implement the Committee's decisions, which is the practical reason its seat is not shared with the other regional banks.

Finding who votes this year

The FOMC publishes the current voting roster alongside its statements and minutes, so a reader can check which four rotating presidents hold a seat in any given year without working through the cycle by hand. For a fuller picture of how the Board, the regional banks and the Committee fit together, The Federal Reserve: Who Decides What sets out the structure the rotation sits inside, and the What Happens on an FOMC Decision Day guide covers how a vote is actually taken once the roster is set.

A regional Federal Reserve Bank president who has no vote in a given year still sits at the table for every meeting, still argues the case for or against a move, and still contributes a projection to the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), the set of individual forecasts for growth, unemployment, inflation and the policy rate that the Committee publishes four times a year. The SEP does not label which projection came from which president, but it does not need to: the point is that the range of views a reader sees in the SEP includes every regional bank, not only the ones with a vote that year.

Where a non-voting view still gets recorded

The minutes of each meeting, released a few weeks after the decision, describe the discussion in the room and record any dissent, whether it came from a voter or not. A non-voting president cannot cast a dissenting vote, since there is no vote to dissent from, but their objections to the Committee's reasoning appear in the same minutes as anyone else's. A reader trying to work out whether the Committee was more divided than the vote count suggests has to read the minutes themselves.

The practical effect is that the rotation changes who signs the statement. The Federal Reserve: Who Decides What sets out how the Board of Governors, the regional banks and the Committee itself fit together, and the FOMC's own implementation note, published with each decision, is where the mechanics of the policy rate itself are written down for whoever the current voters happen to be.