Will the Fed leave its target range unchanged at the September 16, 2026 meeting?
FOMC announcement 2026-09-16 · 43 days away · current target range 3.50-3.75%
Fed funds futures imply
Unavailable
No futures settlement price has been recorded for this contract month yet.
- Source
- Fed funds futures (CME ZQ), manual entry
- Status
- no data
Kalshi contracts imply
49.5%
probability of no change · Kalshi event contracts
- Read at
- 05 Aug 2026, 03:27 UTC
- Event
- KXFED-26SEP
- Widest spread
- 2¢
- Volume
- 24,741
- Open interest
- 13,231
- Confidence
- ok
A difference is only published when both readings are available. See each source above for why it is not.
These are not the same measurement. Fed funds futures and Kalshi contracts are not measuring the same thing. A futures-implied probability is extracted from the price of a contract that large institutions use to hedge interest-rate exposure, so its price embeds term premium, risk premium and hedging demand alongside any view about the Fed. A Kalshi price is a direct statement of probability, but it embeds trading fees, the cost of tying up capital until the contract settles, and the preferences of a different and largely retail set of participants. Both numbers are honest answers to slightly different questions. A gap between them is therefore not automatically evidence that either market is wrong, and Parallax does not claim it is. We publish the difference because it is real, measurable and currently published nowhere else — not because we know which side is right.
| Outcome | Futures | Kalshi | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cut 50 bp | — | 0.0% | — |
| Cut 25 bp | — | 1.0% | — |
| No change | — | 49.5% | — |
| Raise 25 bp | — | 47.5% | — |
| Raise 50 bp | — | 1.0% | — |
| Cut of any size | — | 1.5% | — |
The futures-implied distribution is derived by assuming all probability sits on the two adjacent 25 basis point steps around the implied average rate — the same assumption CME's FedWatch tool makes. One consequence matters when reading the distribution: whenever the implied move points in one direction, this method assigns exactly zero to every outcome in the opposite direction. That zero is a property of the method, not a statement by the futures market, so a difference measured against it should not be read as disagreement.
Kalshi prices a 1.0% chance of a move larger than 50 basis points. Those outcomes have no row above, so the Kalshi column sums to 99.0% rather than 100%, and "cut of any size" is correspondingly larger than the cut rows alone.
What this page is saying
Two very different markets are pricing the same event: what the Federal Open Market Committee will announce on September 16, 2026. Fed funds futures are contracts used mainly by institutions to hedge interest-rate exposure; the probability above is not quoted anywhere, it has to be extracted from the contract’s price. Kalshi contracts settle at one dollar or nothing, so their price states a probability outright. Nobody publishes the two side by side, which is the only thing this page does.
Parallax publishes the probability that the FOMC leaves its target range unchanged. That outcome is chosen because both methods can express it in any rate environment, which keeps a single consistent time series comparable over time. The probabilities of a cut and of a hike are shown in full in the distribution table.
Why the two numbers can legitimately differ
- They price different instruments. A futures contract settles against the average overnight rate across a whole month, so its price reflects the timing of a decision as well as its direction. A Kalshi contract settles on the announced range alone.
- They are held by different people for different reasons. A hedger who must reduce interest-rate exposure will accept a worse price to do it. That demand moves a futures price without anyone changing their mind about the Fed.
- Holding a position costs something. Money committed to a Kalshi contract is tied up until it settles, and fees apply. Both effects move a quoted probability away from what a participant actually believes.
- Our futures method is a model, and models simplify. It assumes the outcome falls on one of the two nearest quarter-point steps. Where the real range of possibilities is wider, that assumption compresses it.
So neither reading is necessarily the “right” one, and a difference between them is not by itself evidence that either market has made a mistake. What we can say is that the difference is real, that it is measured the same way every day, and that both inputs are recorded so any number here can be reconstructed later. The methodology sets out the arithmetic in full.