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A chart the Fed publishes 4 times a year showing where each Fed official thinks interest rates should go.
Four times a year - at the March, June, September, and December FOMC meetings - the Federal Reserve publishes a chart called the dot plot. Every participant in the Federal Open Market Committee - all 7 governors and all 12 Reserve Bank presidents, not just the 12 voting members - marks where they personally think the federal funds rate should be at the end of this year, in each of the next two or three calendar years (a third out-year is added starting with the September release), and over the longer run. Each member's projection appears as a single dot on the chart. With 19 participants on the committee, there are typically 19 dots in each column.
A chart the Fed publishes 4 times a year showing where each Fed official thinks interest rates should go.
Four times a year - at the March, June, September, and December FOMC meetings - the Federal Reserve publishes a chart called the dot plot. Every participant in the Federal Open Market Committee - all 7 governors and all 12 Reserve Bank presidents, not just the 12 voting members - marks where they personally think the federal funds rate should be at the end of this year, in each of the next two or three calendar years (a third out-year is added starting with the September release), and over the longer run. Each member's projection appears as a single dot on the chart. With 19 participants on the committee, there are typically 19 dots in each column.
The chart is one of the closest things to a window into the heads of the people who set U.S. monetary policy. You can see which Fed officials are pushing for higher rates (their dots sit toward the top of the column), which are pushing for lower rates (bottom), how much disagreement exists across the committee (how spread out the dots are), and the median view (the middle dot). Markets pay enormous attention to it. A single-meeting shift in the median dot can move stocks and bonds in seconds.
The dots aren't a forecast in the usual sense. Each Fed official is essentially saying "if I had my way, here's what I would set the rate to in 2026 and 2027 and beyond." The committee doesn't vote on this. It's not a commitment. It's a snapshot of opinion. But because Fed officials are the people who actually move the rate, their collective opinion is informative.
The dot plot was introduced under Chair Ben Bernanke in 2012 as part of a broader transparency push at the Fed. Before then, the public had to guess what the FOMC was thinking. Now there's an explicit visual representation, updated every quarter. The Chair (Kevin Warsh as of this writing, who succeeded Jerome Powell in May 2026) is careful to remind reporters at every press conference that the dots are conditional and individual, not a committee path - but markets still treat them as the single most important Fed forward-guidance signal.
Quarterly Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) showing each FOMC participant's preferred rate path.
The dot plot is part of the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), a broader document released alongside the FOMC policy statement at the four quarterly meetings (March, June, September, December). The full SEP includes projections for real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, headline PCE inflation, core PCE inflation, and the federal funds rate. Each variable has projections for the current year-end, two or three out-years (the third is added at the September release), and a "longer run" value reflecting each participant's view of the equilibrium level.
Who contributes: 19 SEP participants - the 7 Federal Reserve Board governors plus the 12 Reserve Bank presidents. Note that the SEP includes all 12 Reserve Bank presidents, not just the 5 who are voting members in any given year (the New York Fed president holds a permanent vote; 4 other presidents rotate annually). So the dot plot reflects a broader range of policy views than the FOMC voting roster alone.
Each participant submits projections under a specific framing: each one's projection of what the appropriate federal funds rate would be at each horizon under their own preferred policy path, conditional on their own preferred forecast for GDP, unemployment, and inflation. This is a key conceptual point - the dots are not forecasts of what the rate WILL be; they're each participant's own preferred policy path under their own outlook.
The chart shows each individual dot as an anonymous mark on the chart. You can see how many dots are at each level, but not which dot belongs to which participant. The official SEP PDF accompanying each release contains the underlying numerical values, the median, the central tendency (the range after dropping the three highest and three lowest), and the full range. The chart is reproduced in major financial media within minutes of the 2:00 PM ET release.
Markets focus on three things at each release: (1) where did the median end-of-current-year dot move relative to last quarter? (2) where did the longer-run dot (the implied neutral rate, r-star) move? (3) how dispersed are the dots? A tighter cluster signals committee convergence; a wider spread signals committee fragmentation. A 25 bp upward median shift between meetings is a significant hawkish surprise; a 25 bp downward shift is significantly dovish.
The Chair's press conference at 2:30 PM ET, half an hour after the SEP release, almost always addresses the dots. The Chair will frame the dots in context, note dispersion, and remind reporters that the dots are conditional and individual rather than a committee commitment. This press-conference framing materially affects how the dots are interpreted; a hawkish dot shift can be softened by a dovish press-conference tone, and vice versa.
Historical adoption: the SEP itself dates to October 2007, and the rate projections - the dot plot - were added in January 2012 under Bernanke as part of the broader transparency push. Before that, the FOMC published numeric forecast ranges without the explicit per-participant rate-path visualization. The dot plot's introduction was specifically designed to convey forward guidance about the rate path more explicitly than the narrative would alone.
The dots are released at 2:00 PM ET with the policy statement; the Chair's press conference begins 2:30 PM ET. The full SEP, including dot plot, projections table, and a brief written explanation, is posted on the Federal Reserve Board's website at https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm.
FEDTARMD (median), FEDTARCTH/FEDTARCTL (central tendency), FEDTARRH/FEDTARRL (full range); conditional, not committee-agreed path.
Each SEP dot is a conditional projection. Each participant's dot represents: "under MY preferred forecast for GDP, unemployment, and inflation, the appropriate federal funds rate at year-end is X." The dots are conditional on each participant's own economic outlook, which is not directly observable from the SEP itself (though the SEP also includes ranges and medians for each macro variable).
The central tendency is the range after dropping the three highest and three lowest projections, leaving 13 of the 19 dots. The full range is all 19. Both are reported in the official SEP table. Central tendency is the standard measure of "the body of the committee" - it filters out the most aggressive hawk and dove views to give the moderate-majority range.
FRED publishes a small set of dot-plot summary series: FEDTARMD (median target rate), FEDTARCTH/FEDTARCTL (central-tendency high/low), and FEDTARRH/FEDTARRL (full-range high/low). These cover every horizon in the release (current year, the two or three published out-years, longer run) at each SEP meeting. Individual dots are anonymous, but the Fed's accessible HTML version of each release publishes the dot distribution as a table (the number of participants at each rate level for each year); FRED carries only the summary series.
Longer-run dot - the "r-star" estimate. Each participant's longer-run federal funds projection reflects their view of the equilibrium / neutral rate ("r-star" in academic literature) plus their longer-run inflation projection (typically 2.0%). The longer-run dot has trended down over the decade-plus history of the SEP - from approximately 4.0% (early-mid 2010s) to approximately 2.5% (2019–22) to approximately 2.5–3.0% (2023–25 as committee members have re-evaluated post-COVID neutral-rate estimates).
Dispersion dynamics: the spread of dots provides information about committee disagreement. A standard deviation of 25–50 bps across the current-year column is typical; a standard deviation above 75 bps signals meaningful fragmentation. Periods of high dispersion (2019, 2022) coincided with policy turning points. Periods of tight clustering (2012–14) coincided with steady-state policy.
Forward-rate-curve comparison: the implied federal funds path from OIS market pricing can be compared to the SEP median dot path at each release. Divergences signal market disagreement with the Fed's projected path. The OIS market consistently priced cuts faster than the Fed dots projected through 2022–23; the Fed delivered cuts faster than the dots projected through 2024 (the September 2024 50 bp cut was below where most participants had projected). The market-vs-dot gap is a meaningful forward-guidance interpretation tool.
Dot diffusion indices: practitioners construct summary statistics on dot movements - number of dots moved up, number moved down, magnitude of median shift, change in dot dispersion. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and other dealer rates research teams publish dot-diffusion analyses within minutes of each SEP release.
The "appropriate policy path" framing matters. The Federal Reserve's published explanation of the SEP framework explicitly notes that participants project their preferred policy path conditional on their own forecast. This is different from a consensus forecast (where all participants would assume a single policy path), and different from a forecast of expected policy (where participants would forecast committee behavior rather than their own preferences). The conditional individual framing is unusual among central-bank projection regimes globally.
Forward-guidance considerations: dots have become a primary forward-guidance vehicle. The Chair and other FOMC participants regularly reference the dots in speeches. A participant moving their own dot publicly signals their evolving view; the collective median move signals the committee's evolving center. This guidance role means the dots have some self-fulfilling-prophecy properties - markets price in the dots, the Fed delivers what markets expect, the dots align with realized policy.
Common practitioner mistakes: (1) treating the dots as a committee forecast - they're not, they're individual conditional projections; (2) treating a single-dot move as a committee shift - individual dots move at every meeting without changing the median; (3) ignoring the press-conference framing - the Chair's Q&A often softens or sharpens the dots' market implication; (4) using stale data - dots are revised every quarter, and a 6-month-old dot picture is no longer informative about current expectations; (5) over-interpreting the longer-run dot as a precise r-star estimate when it embeds longer-run inflation assumptions.
Median has been a poor predictor of actual rate path; useful as dispersion snapshot, not forecast.
Historical track record: the SEP median rate path has consistently under-forecast the magnitude of policy moves in major turning-point episodes. The 2019 SEP under-forecast the depth of 2019–20 cuts (the Fed cut to zero in March 2020; SEP projections from late 2019 saw rates rising). The 2021 SEP under-forecast the speed of the 2022–23 hike cycle (early 2021 SEP saw rates at ~0.1% through 2023; actual policy hit 5.25–5.50% by mid-2023). The 2023 SEP over-forecast where rates would sit in 2024 (projected 4.6% median end-2024; actual was lower as the Fed cut 100 bps).
Why the predictive miss: dots reflect individual preferred policy paths conditional on individual forecasts, both of which are subject to forecast error from incoming economic data. The Fed reacts to data; if data surprises, both the policy path and the dot projections shift. The dots are not a commitment and are not designed to be unbiased predictors of actual policy.
The correct use of the dots: (1) snapshot of committee dispersion at a point in time, (2) directional shift between meetings as a signal of the center of committee gravity, (3) longer-run dot as a roughly-tracked r-star indicator with the caveat that it bundles longer-run inflation expectations. The dots are best used as a real-time committee-view snapshot rather than as a multi-quarter rate forecast.
Research literature: Krishnamurthy & Vissing-Jorgensen (2013) on the channels of large-scale asset purchases; Gürkaynak-Sack-Swanson (2005) on the "target" vs "path" factor decomposition of FOMC surprises; Bauer & Swanson (2023) on the Fed-information-effect literature. Modern empirical work on SEP-vs-market gap dynamics: see various Fed staff papers and dealer research publications on SEP-day market reactions.
The Federal Reserve's own Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections (https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/guide-to-the-summary-of-economic-projections.htm) is the authoritative reference for the projection framework. The Federal Reserve Bulletin and the FOMC's published Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy (the framework document, last revised in August 2025, when the flexible-average-inflation-targeting language adopted in 2020 was removed) provide the institutional context.
Individual dot identification: the SEP doesn't disclose which dot belongs to which participant. Public statements by participants in the days following each SEP often reveal individual positions - Bullard's persistent hawkish dot during 2022 was identifiable from his subsequent speeches; Brainard's dovish dots during the early 2020s were similarly inferable from public commentary. Reporters and analysts construct "dot attribution" maps from these public statements, with varying accuracy.
Framing changes over time: the SEP was launched in October 2007; the federal funds rate projections (the dot plot) were added in January 2012, when there were 17 participants because of Board vacancies (the full complement is 19). Longer-run projections were added to the SEP's macro variables in 2009; the rate projections included a longer-run column from their 2012 debut. Before the SEP, the FOMC published numeric forecast ranges in the semiannual Monetary Policy Report (Humphrey-Hawkins testimony) without per-participant detail.
Framework review impact: the 2020 monetary-policy framework review introduced FAIT (flexible average inflation targeting). The 2024–25 framework review concluded in August 2025 with a revised strategy statement that dropped the average-inflation-targeting makeup language; it did not change the SEP or dot-plot format. Framework reviews recur roughly every five years, so the next is expected around 2030.
Foreign-central-bank comparison: the RBNZ (since 1997), Norges Bank (since 2005), and Sveriges Riksbank (since 2007) publish explicit numeric policy-rate paths; the Bank of Canada publishes economic projections in its Monetary Policy Report but no policy-rate path. The Fed's individual-participant dot plot is unusual in its disclosure granularity but consistent with the broader central-bank transparency trend.
Data provenance for this site: the dots are sourced from the official SEP PDF for each quarterly release; the median (FEDTARMD), the central tendency (FEDTARCTH/FEDTARCTL), and the full range (FEDTARRH/FEDTARRL) are also on FRED. Individual dot positions were previously hand-extracted from the PDFs; that section was removed in v1.9.0 because hand-reconstruction of individual dot positions doesn't meet the site's real-data-only standard.
Open issues debated in academic and policy commentary: (1) should the SEP be released with the meeting statement or after the press conference, to allow Chair framing first? (2) should individual dot identification be disclosed? (3) should the longer-run projection be split into separate r-star and longer-run inflation components? (4) should conditional vs unconditional framing be revisited? Each has been raised in framework reviews; none has been adopted.
Real-time data caveat for analytical use: dot-plot data is updated only quarterly, and significant policy shifts between SEP meetings (e.g., emergency cuts, off-meeting hikes) are not reflected in the published dots until the next quarterly release. Forecasters often interpolate between dot releases using market-implied probabilities and Fed speech analysis, but the published dots are point-in-time snapshots.