Will the Fed funds target upper bound end 2026 at three percent?

The headline figure is the consensus of 0% across venues. That is not a rounding artefact of thin trading: cumulative volume on this contract runs to roughly $498,284, which is a real market rather than a stale listing. A price pinned at the floor of a market that has seen half a million dollars of turnover is a strong statement. It says participants do not regard 2.75-3.00% as a plausible destination for December, not that they have failed to form a view. The mechanical constraint explains most of it. The Committee moves in 25 basis point increments as a matter of practice, and it has three scheduled meetings left in the year. Absent an unusually aggressive sequence — 50 basis points at a single meeting, consecutive moves at every remaining date, or an action between meetings — the set of levels reachable by 9 December is narrow. Any level more than three steps from the current setting is arithmetically out of reach on a one-step-per-meeting path. When a year-end level market sits at zero with three meetings to go, the most economical reading is that this particular rung is either outside that reachable band or requires a path the market considers remote. There is a second reason these level contracts collapse to zero faster than a general "will the Fed cut" question. Precision cuts both ways. A trader can be broadly right about direction and still lose on a specific rung, because the probability mass sits on the adjacent 25 basis point level. That makes the tails of the distribution unusually cheap to sell and unusually hard to defend, and it is why, in a family of eight or ten level contracts, most of them trade near nothing for most of the year while one or two carry almost all the value. Only one venue lists this contract, so there is no cross-venue spread to read. That matters for interpretation. When the same question trades on two exchanges with different settlement sources, a gap between them usually reflects a rules difference rather than a disagreement about the world. Here there is no such signal, and no second book to confirm or contradict the price. The offset is that the settlement source is about as unambiguous as macro markets get: the FOMC statement itself, published on federalreserve.gov within minutes of the decision. What would genuinely reprice this is a change in the reachable band rather than a change in tone. The 16 September Summary of Economic Projections gives every participant's year-end view in one document; the December meeting produces another. Between them sit two monthly employment reports and two CPI prints ahead of the October meeting, and more before December. A labour market deterioration sharp enough to justify a 50 basis point move, or an inflation surprise large enough to stall the path entirely, is the kind of event that redistributes probability across the level ladder. Short of that, contracts at the tails tend to stay where they are until settlement resolves them at nothing.