Fed Rate Decision Odds on Polymarket: July 2026

The Federal Reserve's rate-setting committee meets July 28-29, and Polymarket's "Fed Decision in July" event has traded $5.9M in the last 24 hours - the most active market on the site right now. A hold at the current 3.50-3.75% range prices at 85.95c, down 7.1c on the day. A 25 basis point hike prices at 13.25c, up 6.8c. Both numbers have been drifting the same direction all week, most of the move landing in a single stretch on July 21, even though the inflation data that came out that week actually cooled. Prices below are from the Gamma and CLOB APIs, fetched 2026-07-22 at 09:06 UTC.

Five outcomes, one meeting

Polymarket splits the July decision into five separately-traded Yes/No markets rather than one multi-way pick. Current prices and today's move:

FED DECISION IN JULY                 PRICE    24H
No change (3.50-3.75%)              85.95c     -7.1c
Hike 25bps (to 3.75-4.00%)          13.25c     +6.8c
Cut 25bps (to 3.25-3.50%)            0.45c     +0.1c
Hike 50+bps                          0.55c     +0.2c
Cut 50+bps                           0.15c        -

The five outcomes are mutually exclusive - only one basis-point change actually happens on July 29 - and today's prices sum to 100.35c, close enough to 100 to show the separate books agreeing with each other. The committee has held its target range steady at 3.50-3.75% for four straight meetings, most recently a unanimous 12-0 vote on June 17 under new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. A hike would be the first change of any kind on his watch.

The hold price lost 7.5 points in seven days

The chart shows two regimes. Through the middle of last week the hold price sat in the low-to-mid 90s, ground down slowly as +25bps climbed from 6.5c into the low teens. Then on July 21 the hold price fell from the low 90s to an intraday low near 82c in a few hours, while +25bps spiked past 15c, before both partially retraced overnight to the levels quoted above. That single day accounts for most of the week's move.

The obvious explanation doesn't quite fit

The week's most consequential data point landed before the big move, not during it: June's Consumer Price Index, released July 14. Headline CPI came in at 3.5% year-over-year, down from 4.2% in May and below the 3.8-3.9% economists had forecast - the largest monthly drop in headline inflation since April 2020. Core CPI (excluding food and energy) held flat on the month, putting the 12-month core rate at 2.6%, down from 2.9%. On its face that is a cooler report, and it is not a coincidence that CME's FedWatch measure of futures pricing for a September hike fell from above 75% to 63% in its immediate wake.

The context for why anyone was watching this print so closely was Fed Governor Christopher Waller's July 13 speech, one day before the release. He told the New York Association for Business Economics that core inflation "has steadily moved up...from 3 percent in December 2025 to 3.4 percent in May," and that "if we get another hot reading on core inflation this week, then the FOMC will need to consider tightening monetary policy in the near term." The June print was not hot by that standard - core came in flat, below May's pace. Yet Polymarket's July-meeting hold price kept sliding for another week and took its sharpest single-day drop six days after the data Waller had flagged as the trigger. No single headline from July 21 explains a move that size; the timing is the most concrete fact the price history gives up.

Deep on the favorite, thin on the hike

Order book depth explains how easily each price can move. The no-change market quotes a one-cent-wide 85.9c/86.0c, backed by roughly $3,080 resting on the bid and $500 on the ask - a lot of size for either side to absorb before the price ticks. The +25bps market is wider at 13.1c/13.3c, and the best ask carries only about six shares, roughly 80 cents of notional, before the next level at 13.4c. A market pricing a 13% chance and trading $1.17M a day can still have almost nothing resting at its literal best offer; size sits a level or two back, and a single marketable order can walk the touch.

One meeting, then a fresh board

The FOMC's two-day meeting starts July 28, with the rate decision and Chair Warsh's press conference following on July 29 - each of the five markets resolves to the basis-point change (if any) in the upper bound of the federal funds target versus its level going into that meeting. Between now and then there is no other scheduled CPI or PPI release to reprice against; whatever moves this market next is either a Fed official's public remarks in the pre-meeting period or positioning ahead of the decision itself. A market that spent a week drifting against the grain of its own headline catalyst is one worth checking again before Wednesday.

Five books, one terminal screen

A single-question market is easy to watch; an event split across five correlated Yes/No books, each with its own spread and depth, is harder to hold in your head from a web page. In polymarket-tui, opening the Fed Decision event lists all five outcomes together with live prices and 24h moves, and drilling into any one shows its order book and price history inline. No account is needed to browse.

$ uv tool install polymarket-tui
$ polymarket-tui

The install page has Homebrew and one-liner options.