Three Fed Officials Voted to Raise Rates. None Voted to Cut.

The Federal Reserve's rate-setting committee met at the end of July and decided to leave its benchmark rate where it has been. That part was expected. The part worth your attention is the vote: 9 to 3, and all three dissenters wanted to push rates a quarter point higher. Not one member of the committee voted for a cut.

I read the statement so you don't have to (the Fed published it on July 29, and it runs about four paragraphs). The committee kept its target range at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, described the economy as "expanding at a solid pace," and said inflation "remains elevated" relative to its 2 percent goal. Its next scheduled meeting, per the Fed's published calendar, is in mid-September. If part of your growth plan has been parked "until rates come down," the people who set rates just recorded a vote in which nobody favored a cut.

Banks aren't the wall you might expect

Five days after that meeting, the Fed released a different document that gets far less attention. Every quarter it asks senior loan officers at banks across the country a plain question: over the past three months, did you get stricter about business loans, easier, or stay the same? The newest edition, released August 3 with answers from 56 U.S. banks, covers the spring quarter (it's called the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey).

Earlier in the year, the answer had been "somewhat stricter." Banks tightened their approval standards for business loans modestly in the first quarter, citing a more uncertain economic outlook and less appetite for risk. This quarter, the tightening stopped. Banks reported holding their standards steady for businesses of every size.

What did move was pricing. More banks reported narrowing the rate margins they charge business borrowers than widening them, smaller firms included, and more reported making credit lines cheaper as well, most clearly for larger companies. Asked why they were easing, the answer banks gave most often was "more aggressive competition from other banks or nonbanks." Banks aren't rationing business credit this quarter. They're competing for it.

One honest caveat from the same survey. Banks were also asked where their standards sit today compared with the past two decades, and for the very smallest borrowers they put them near the middle of that range.

Big companies are borrowing. Most owners are waiting.

The same survey asked who is actually asking for money, and the answer split by size. Demand for business loans rose among large and midsize companies, which in the Fed's survey means at least $50 million a year in sales, and stayed flat among smaller firms. The reasons banks gave for that stronger demand read like a growth checklist: customers investing in plant and equipment, plus financing needs for inventory and accounts receivable.

Small business owners, on the whole, are sitting this round out. In NFIB's June survey of its members, 22 percent of owners said they borrow regularly. The long-run average is 34 percent. And when the owners who do borrow regularly were asked what they expect from credit conditions over the next few months, the ones expecting harder outnumbered the ones expecting easier by five points.

Put those findings side by side and the picture is uncomfortable. The big end of the market is borrowing at today's rates to add equipment and inventory. Much of the small end is waiting for a rate cut that, as of the July vote, has no sponsor.

What borrowing actually costs right now

One June number cut against my expectations. The average interest rate NFIB members reported paying on short-term loans was 7.4 percent, down from the month before and the lowest reading since October 2022. Rates haven't fallen the way owners hoped, but they have drifted lower while nobody was celebrating. Financing costs have also slipped well down the worry list: just 3 percent of owners named financing and interest rates their single biggest problem, far behind inflation, taxes, and finding qualified workers.

That doesn't mean rates stopped mattering. A construction owner in Idaho put the other side of it plainly in the same survey: "Interest rates are affecting buyers which is slowing down building jobs."

Put together, the picture looks like this. Money costs less than it did a year and a half ago, the Fed has shown no intention of making it much cheaper soon, and banks are pricing business loans more competitively because lenders are fighting over borrowers. For an owner, that's a set of facts to plan around, whatever the Fed decides in September.

Deciding without a rate forecast

I won't predict what the Fed does in September, and I'd be careful with anyone who will. What I can tell you is how disciplined operators are deciding in the meantime. They start from the project in front of them.

• Price the project, not the prediction. A machine, a bulk inventory buy, or a hiring push either pays for itself at today's cost of money or it doesn't. Weigh the full payback of any offer against what the project will earn, and if the second number wins, the decision is made. Our guide on how business funding costs work breaks those numbers down.
• Know the approval landscape before you apply. In the Fed's latest annual survey of small businesses, most applicants came away with less than they sought, and roughly one in three of all the firms surveyed ended up short of the funding they needed even after applying. I walked through that data, including where approval odds run highest, in what the Fed's survey says about getting funded.
• Match the structure to the need. If the need has a fixed size and an end date, that points to a working capital loan. If cash runs tight in some months and not others, a business line of credit lets you draw only when it does, and you'd be in good company there, since banks told the Fed that inquiries about new and larger credit lines picked up this quarter.
• Decide what the timeline is worth. Banks reward patience and paperwork. Alternative funders answer in days and charge for the speed. Neither is automatically right, and our side-by-side on bank loans and alternative funding shows where each one earns its place.

If the numbers work at today's rates

At Monera Capital, the bar is generally six months in business and $10,000 a month in revenue, and the businesses we fund run from construction contractors to wholesale distributors. A decision typically takes 4 – 8 hours. The check that starts it is a soft credit pull, so your score isn't affected, and you'll know the full cost of any offer before you commit to it. If the project on your desk pays at today's cost of money, there's no reason to wait on a meeting in Washington. See what you qualify for.

Data in this article comes from the Federal Open Market Committee's statement of July 29, 2026, and from the Federal Reserve's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, July 2026 edition (released August 3, 2026) and April 2026 edition. Small business figures come from the NFIB June 2026 Small Business Economic Trends report, a copyright of the NFIB Research Center, and from the Federal Reserve Banks' 2026 Report on Employer Firms, findings from the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey. Figures are the latest available as of publication and are subject to revision by their sources.