US federal funds effective rate

Source: FRED series DFF (daily effective) and FEDFUNDS (monthly). Licence: FRED data terms: free use in publications and websites with attribution (terms). Files: data/raw/fred-dff.csv + data/raw/fred-fedfunds.csv.

Reading this series

The effective federal funds rate is the volume-weighted average of overnight unsecured trades between depository institutions, published by the Federal Reserve and republished here from FRED. The headline uses the daily series DFF; the long history and the summary statistics use the monthly series FEDFUNDS, which begins in 1954. The Federal Open Market Committee sets a target range, but the effective rate is a market outcome inside that range, so it can differ slightly from the target and from day to day.

Because it is a market average rather than a stepped policy setting, the daily line is jagged; the chart here uses month-end points for the long run. Read the headline with its as-of date, then the "versus the previous reading" line for the direction of the last change. Mean, median, low and high describe the observations in this build, not an official summary. Chart and Table show the same series two ways, the range buttons shorten the window, and Explore loads zoom and pan only when requested. Fed funds is not a mortgage, CD or prime rate.

About this desk

The Australia desk leads with the RBA's cash rate target, then New Zealand's OCR and the US federal funds rate, with the rest of the build's series after them. The cash rate is the RBA board's policy target for the overnight money market, published in the F1 daily and F1.1 monthly tables; the page uses the daily target for the headline and the monthly history for the long chart. Because it changes only at board meetings, the series is drawn as steps.

All desks show the same official series, reordered toward one economy; the figures do not change with the desk. Values are republished from official files without alteration. The build publishes no Australian mortgage or deposit rate, because no official series for those is ingested — the desk omits them rather than estimating. This is not financial advice, and readings may lag their source.