About the data

Who votes

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) sets US interest rates. It has twelve voting seats: the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board, the president of the New York Fed, and four of the other eleven Reserve Bank presidents, who take turns a year at a time. When Board seats are empty, fewer than twelve vote.

What is counted

The site keeps three levels apart.

• Meeting or call: a date on which the Committee met or held a call and recorded a vote.
• Decision: what was voted on. Each meeting has one policy decision, a single vote on the rate, the guidance about future policy and the balance sheet. Some meetings also hold separate votes: on foreign-currency authorities and swap lines, on lending facilities or market-operation tests, on annual money-growth ranges (until 2000), or on the Committee's statement of longer-run goals.
• Vote: how each member voted on a decision.

The tally shown for a meeting is the vote on its policy decision. A dissent on a separate vote is listed under "Separate votes", not counted against the policy decision. For example, on 28 January 2015 the policy decision was 10–0; Jeffrey Lacker dissented on two separate votes, on foreign-currency authorities and on reverse-repo tests.

How dissents are classified

Each dissent has two labels.

• Subject: the rate, guidance, or the balance sheet (all part of the policy decision), or the matter of a separate vote.
• Stance, relative to what the Committee did: tighter (higher rates or less easing), looser (lower rates or more easing), or unclear when the record does not show a direction, as with most objections to foreign-exchange intervention.

So a dissent on guidance can be tighter without asking for a higher rate: in April 2026 three presidents supported holding rates but voted against the statement's easing bias. And stance is relative: a member who wanted a smaller cut than the Committee chose is counted as tighter, even though they also wanted a cut. The chart, the filters, the tables and the downloads all use these same labels.

Coverage

• Every recorded dissent at the FOMC since February 1987, from the record of policy actions, the minutes or the policy statement.
• Every voter on each policy decision from 2009 on, and at a few earlier meetings. Earlier decisions list dissenters only, until the full lists have been rebuilt from the Fed's minutes.
• For each policy decision from July 1990 on, the federal funds target that followed it, from the Fed's open market operations pages.

Some changes in the federal funds target had no Committee vote, so there is no vote to list. Before 1994 the target was not announced and the trading desk often moved it between meetings within the Committee's directive. Later, the Chair occasionally moved it after consulting members on a call, as on 18 April 1994.

Target changes on a day with no listed policy decision: 15 in all, 13 before February 1994 and 2 since.

Sources

Every vote and dissent shown links to a Federal Reserve document. Each dissent was checked by hand against that document.

Updates

The tracker is updated after each FOMC decision, usually the same day. The next scheduled decision is 9 December 2026.

Research

The data come from Laurence Wilse-Samson's research on Federal Reserve dissent. Corrections are welcome: see lwilsesamson.com/contact.

Reuse

The data are free to reuse with credit under CC BY 4.0. Download links and a citation are at the foot of every page.