A central bank decision usually arrives as a headline: a rate held, a rate cut, a quarter point added or taken away. What sits behind that headline is a set of documents, each with its own name and its own publication date, and a set of instruments that do specific, separate jobs. The Federal Open Market Committee sets a target range for the federal funds rate, but the range itself is a target: it is the interest the Federal Reserve pays banks on the reserves they hold with it, the Interest on Reserve Balances (IORB), that does the work of holding market rates inside that range.

Reading the document, not just the number

The rate a news report gives you is one line taken from a longer record. The FOMC implementation note published alongside each policy statement lists every administered rate and the date each one takes effect. The Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), published four times a year, shows what the Committee's own members expect for growth, unemployment and inflation.

Arithmetic you can check

A quarter-point move sounds small until it is run against an actual mortgage balance or a card balance, step by step, with each input named. Reading the calculation is different from reading a claim about it: it lets you see where the number came from and where it might not apply to your own figures.

The Central Banking Glossary sets out the terms this record depends on, and the guide to who decides what inside the Federal Reserve explains where the votes behind a decision actually sit. The balance sheet explainer covers the slower-moving instrument, quantitative easing and quantitative tightening, that a single rate decision doesn't show.

A rate decision itself is usually one line in a much longer document. The Federal Open Market Committee sets a target range for the federal funds rate, and that number is what makes the headlines, but the statement released alongside it, the implementation note that follows, and the minutes published some weeks later each carry their own changes worth reading closely.

What tends to move between decisions

• The target range itself, and whether it changed from the previous meeting
• The wording of the statement, where a single added or dropped phrase can signal a shift in how the Committee is reading the economy
• The rates set in the implementation note, including the rate paid on reserve balances that anchors the floor of the system
• How the vote split, and which members, if any, dissented

Each of these is traceable to a specific published document. The mechanics of how a decision day is structured, and who actually casts a vote in a given year, are covered in more detail on What Happens on an FOMC Decision Day and How the FOMC Voting Rotation Works.

Beyond the rate itself

Not every change shows up in the target range. The size and composition of a central bank's balance sheet shifts between meetings too, as holdings run off or get reinvested, and that has its own published record separate from the rate decision. The mechanics of that process are set out in The Balance Sheet, Explained.

Updates on individual decisions and on changes to the covered central banks' published documents are collected in the Updates section as they occur.