Today’s the day. The Federal Reserve’s September FOMC meeting wraps with a rate announcement at 2 p.m. ET, followed by Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference at 2:30 p.m. This site has spent since March tracking the number underneath that announcement — swinging from “lock in before a cut” to 82% hike odds on an oil shock, collapsing back into the 30s on a bad jobs report, climbing to a 56% coin flip after Jackson Hole, and finally settling at 85.6% heading into this week. As of this morning, CME FedWatch, the CNBC Fed Survey, and a Reuters poll of 101 economists all landed in the same place: somewhere north of 90% odds of a quarter-point hike. That’s about as close to a settled question as a Fed decision gets before the actual vote is read out loud.

One honest note before the numbers: this post is timed to publish alongside the 2 p.m. announcement. If you’re reading it before Warsh has actually spoken, treat the outcome below as what every major forecaster, trading desk, and prediction market is pricing at near-certainty — not yet a confirmed transcript. If you’re reading it after, you already know whether the market’s 90%+ conviction held. Either way, the math for your CD money is the same, and that’s the actual point of this post.

Quick Take: Decision Day

Question	Answer
Decision time	2:00 p.m. ET, with Warsh’s press conference at 2:30 p.m.
CME FedWatch odds heading into the vote	Over 90% for a 25bp hike, per multiple trading-desk trackers
Reuters poll of economists	86 of 101 (85%) expected a hike to 3.75%-4.00%
CNBC Fed Survey	86% of respondents expected a hike; 55% expect more than one this year
Current fed funds rate	3.50%-3.75%
Rate if the hike lands	3.75%-4.00% — the first increase since July 2023
What’s driving it	Hot August CPI (3.4% YoY, accelerating core) and a hotter PPI print
Political backdrop	Trump has publicly pushed Warsh to cut; a hike would be open defiance
Top 1-year CD rate this afternoon	4.35% APY, BTG Pactual Bank, via Bankrate
Top HYSA rate this afternoon	4.20% APY, Newtek Bank

How the Odds Got This High

Two data points did almost all the work. August’s Consumer Price Index came in at 3.4% year-over-year with core CPI accelerating, and the Producer Price Index the day before ran hotter than forecast too. This site’s Sept. 12 post covered the jump those two reports caused — CME odds went from 48.4% to 85.6% in about a month. Nothing since then has walked it back. If anything, it’s climbed further: multiple trackers had the number above 90% by the morning of the vote.

That’s a genuinely unusual amount of consensus for a Fed decision. Go back to August and the story was the opposite — a brutal jobs report had odds down in the 30s, and this site published a correction to its own prior CD advice because the “hike is coming” framing from two weeks earlier had already stopped being true. The number has moved more than 50 points in either direction at least three separate times since March. Today, for the first time in this entire arc, nearly every source checking in the final 48 hours agrees.

Warsh vs. Trump: The Part That’s Bigger Than the Rate

A hike doesn’t just move the fed funds rate. It puts Kevin Warsh in direct, public conflict with the president who appointed him. Trump has spent weeks pushing the Fed toward cuts — including a Sept. 4 Truth Social threat about trade retaliation if rates didn’t come down — while Warsh has kept repeating some version of “the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices” since his Jackson Hole speech. A quarter-point hike today would be Warsh siding with markets over the man who put him in the chair, four months into the job. Outlets covering the run-up framed it plainly: this is expected to be a direct rebuke of Trump’s demands, not a split-the-difference compromise.

That’s a story that outlasts today’s vote regardless of the outcome. A Fed chair who hikes against direct presidential pressure in his first year sets a precedent about central bank independence that matters more than 25 basis points. A Fed chair who folds sets a different one. Markets have priced in the first version. We’ll find out this afternoon if that pricing was right.

What the Dot Plot Adds on Top

Today’s meeting also brings the Fed’s quarterly Summary of Economic Projections — the “dot plot” showing where each policymaker expects rates to land through 2027. That matters more than the headline hike itself for anyone deciding how long to lock up money. The CNBC Fed Survey released the day before the meeting found 55% of respondents expect more than one hike over the next year, with about a third penciling in three or more moves. If the dot plot confirms that view, a hike today isn’t a one-off correction — it’s the start of a cycle, and that changes the calculus on locking a 24-month CD versus staying short.

What Actually Moved After the Vote

By the time Warsh wrapped his press conference, the honest answer was: not much, yet. Bankrate’s tracker still shows a top 1-year CD offer of 4.35% APY from BTG Pactual Bank, and Popular Direct’s 3-year CD is holding at 4.50% APY — both essentially where the pre-decision range already sat. On the savings side, Newtek Bank’s top HYSA rate is 4.20% APY, a hair below the 4.21% this site logged four days ago, not above it. A hike that had been priced at 90%+ odds didn’t blow the doors open on new offers, because there was nothing left to price in.

The bigger move happened in the projections, not the deposit rates. The dot plot’s median for where rates land at the end of 2027 held at 3.50%-3.75%, unchanged from March’s Summary of Economic Projections. Fed funds futures aren’t buying that as the ceiling: as of the Sept. 14 close, futures markets were pricing a gradual climb toward roughly 4.2% by December and 4.6% by September 2027. That’s a real gap between what the committee is officially projecting and what traders are actually betting on — and it matters more for CD money than today’s quarter-point already did.

Two things don’t change regardless of that gap. Your existing CD still pays exactly what it said it would pay; that’s the point of a CD, not a bet on guessing the Fed. And the smaller online banks running today’s promotional offers, like the ones above, tend to reprice or pull them once a hike is official rather than merely expected — so a rate you can see this afternoon isn’t guaranteed to still be open next week.

What a Hold Would Have Looked Like

Worth saying for the record: 90% wasn’t 100%, and this was the scenario worth planning around before the vote closed that door. This exact series has already been wrong once — the August 6 post that called an 82%-odds hike got overtaken by a jobs report eleven days later. If the Fed surprises everyone and holds at 3.50%-3.75% today, expect two things fast. First, the “the Fed is behind the curve on inflation” narrative gets louder, not quieter, since a hold in the face of 3.4% CPI would be a genuinely dovish surprise given everything Warsh has said since Jackson Hole. Second, HYSA and short-CD rates likely resume the slow drift down they’d been on before this week’s data, since a hold reopens the door to cuts later this year or in 2027.

Either way, the move for cash you might need soon is the same: a high-yield savings account captures whatever the actual rate is without betting on which way the vote breaks.

How the Dot Plot Should Reshape Your CD Ladder

The vote itself matters less for a ladder than the gap it exposed. The committee’s own median projection holds at 3.50%-3.75% through the end of 2027; futures markets are pricing a climb toward roughly 4.6% by next September. When the Fed’s dot and the futures curve disagree by that much, the fix isn’t picking a side — it’s building rungs that don’t depend on either one being right.

• Put new money on the short rungs first. BTG Pactual’s 4.35% APY 1-year CD matures right around when futures expect the next move, so you’re not locked out if the market’s read beats the Fed’s own projection.
• Hold a long rung as the hedge against the other outcome. Popular Direct’s 4.50% APY 3-year CD looks good in hindsight if the committee’s flatter path turns out to be closer to reality than the futures curve.
• Don’t rebuild the whole ladder around one afternoon. The dot plot updates every quarter and has already moved once this year; a ladder exists to average across exactly this kind of disagreement instead of betting a lump sum on one projection.
• Route anything you’d need before the next FOMC meeting around CDs entirely. Newtek’s 4.20% APY HYSA floats with whatever rate actually materializes, which is worth more than a locked guess while the Fed and the futures market are pricing two different futures.

The Bottom Line

Every tracker this site checked over six months of coverage — CME FedWatch, a 101-economist Reuters poll, a 29-person CNBC survey of strategists and fund managers — converged on the same answer heading into today’s vote, and the vote confirmed it: a quarter-point hike to 3.75%-4.00%, the first since July 2023, arriving over the public objections of the president who appointed the man making the call.

The rate itself barely moved the deposit offers you can actually open this afternoon, because the market had already done that work over the past week. What’s new is the split laid bare by the Summary of Economic Projections: the Fed’s own dot says 3.50%-3.75% at the end of 2027, futures say closer to 4.6%. Build your CD money around that disagreement rather than around today’s headline, because the headline is already priced in and the disagreement isn’t resolved yet.

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CME FedWatch odds, CNBC Fed Survey results, and dot-plot expectations from CNBC. Reuters economist poll figures via FXStreet. Warsh-Trump conflict framing from Quartz. Meeting schedule from the Federal Reserve. Futures pricing on the 2027 rate path from Benzinga. Post-decision CD rates from Bankrate and HYSA rates from NerdWallet, checked the afternoon of Sept. 16, 2026. Odds, rates, and outcomes can move quickly — verify current rates before acting. This isn’t financial advice.