The Fed Dot Plot: What Each Dot Assumes, and What It Is Not

Four times a year the Federal Reserve publishes a chart of scattered dots, and within minutes it is described everywhere as the Fed’s forecast for interest rates. It is not one forecast, and it is not the committee speaking with one voice.

It is a set of individual projections, each built on its own assumption about what policy ought to do. Read as one path it says something the chart cannot support. Read as what it is, it says a good deal about how much the people setting policy disagree. This page stays with the structure and never carries a rate level, for a reason set out below.

What the Chart Actually Plots

Since January 2012 the projections each policymaker submits have included where they think the target federal funds rate should appropriately sit for the close of this year, for each of the several years that follow, and for the longer run. One dot per person, per year, stacked in columns, with nothing to say which dot belongs to whom.

The word policymaker is doing more work there than it looks. Projections are gathered from every member of the Board of Governors and from every Federal Reserve Bank president.

The committee that votes is smaller. It seats twelve: the seven governors, the president of the New York Reserve Bank, and four more presidents drawn from the other eleven Reserve Banks on a one-year rotation. Presidents who are not seated still attend and still take part in the discussion.

So the group writing the dots is wider than the group casting votes, and counting dots is not counting votes. That gap is invisible on the chart and it is the first thing most explanations skip.

The charts and tables come out shortly after the meeting closes, at four of the eight meetings scheduled each year. Which materials each central bank publishes, and on what timetable, is compared across the Fed, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England in what a change in policy tone actually is. This page stays with the chart itself.

Every Dot Carries Its Own Assumption

One condition decides how the whole picture should be read, and none of the widely ranked explainers states it.

Each person forecasts growth, unemployment and inflation on the basis of their own judgement about what monetary policy would appropriately do. The rate dot is that judgement made explicit, not a prediction of what the committee will decide.

Two consequences follow. First, two dots at different heights need not disagree about the economy at all. They can describe the same economy and differ only on the policy response it deserves. Second, two dots at the same height can rest on completely different views about how fast prices are rising.

The chart is therefore a scatter of separate conditional scenarios laid over each other, not a distribution of opinions about one shared future. A sentence beginning “the Fed expects” is not something it can support.

Then there is when the dots are written. A first version has to be in by the close of the Friday that precedes the meeting, and it can be amended no later than the second morning of the meeting itself.

So the dots published after the meeting were, for the most part, set down before the meeting began. They are a snapshot of individual views carried into the room, not a summary of what came out of it.

The Horizon Changes Between March and September

The chart is not the same chart four times a year, and the difference is structural rather than cosmetic.

The March and June rounds cover the current year, the two years after it, and the longer run. The September and December rounds cover the current year, the three years after it, and the longer run.

A column that exists in the autumn chart therefore has no counterpart in the spring one. Anyone comparing a given future year across quarters may be comparing a column that only just came into existence with nothing at all.

The longer-run entry is a different kind of object again. It is where a policymaker expects the economy to settle once shocks have worked through, on a horizon they put at roughly five or six years, under policy they consider appropriate. For growth and unemployment those longer-run figures can be read as estimates of the economy’s potential and of its normal unemployment rate, rather than as forecasts of any particular year.

The Dot Plot Is One Page of a Longer Document

The dots are one exhibit inside the Summary of Economic Projections, and the rest of that document is what the dots are conditioned on.

Alongside the rate path, each policymaker submits projections for the change in real gross domestic product, the unemployment rate, inflation on the price index for personal consumption expenditures, and the same index excluding food and energy.

The measurement conventions are specific and easy to misread. Growth and prices are stated fourth quarter on fourth quarter, setting one year’s final three months against the next year’s, and not as annual averages. Unemployment is the fourth-quarter average.

The summary table does not present those projections as one number each. It publishes them three ways, and the definitions are not interchangeable.

What the Median Does and Does Not Mean

The median dot is the number that travels. It is also the number that carries the least information on the chart.

Nothing is decided by taking it. There is no vote on the median, no commitment attached to it, and no mechanism by which it binds anyone who submitted a dot. It is arithmetic applied after the fact to a column of individual entries.

And because each entry rests on its author’s own policy assumption, the median sits in the middle of a set of scenarios rather than in the middle of a forecast. Its meaning depends entirely on the spread around it.

A median with the dots clustered tightly and a median with them scattered across a wide band are different situations that produce the same headline. That is precisely why the range and the central tendency are published next to it.

A median can also move without anyone changing their mind about the economy. The set of people submitting projections changes as governors join or leave and as Reserve Bank leadership changes, and a different set of authors can produce a different middle value on its own.

Why the Figures on Most Explainer Pages Are Already Stale

Every release replaces the one before it, four times a year. Any explanation built around a level is describing one particular quarter, whether or not it says so.

That is not a hypothetical. Among the pages ranking for this question, the longest was published in June 2025 with no modified date, so its numeric core describes a round superseded several times over. A second states a median, a spread and a prior median citing nothing but its own chart labels. A third gives a count of officials and a quotation from the chair with no source for either.

Nothing on this page states a rate level, a median, a count of dots or a projection value. The way the chart is built and conditioned does not change quarterly. The numbers on it do, and a page that leans on them is out of date the moment the next release lands.

What a Currency Trader Can Take From It

Not a level, and not a schedule. Three structural readings survive the quarterly turnover.

The first is dispersion rather than the middle. How widely the dots for a given year are spread is a measure of how much disagreement exists inside the committee, and disagreement is what leaves room for a surprise to be repriced.

The second is whether the horizon just changed. An autumn release adds a year that the previous chart did not contain, so an apparently new signal about a distant year may only be the arrival of a new column.

The third is what the rate path is conditioned on. Every dot sits on top of that person’s projections for growth, prices and unemployment, which is why the scheduled data releases that move those variables matter more than the chart itself. Two of them are what the inflation number measures and a figure revised after you have traded it. How the projections appear in a schedule at all is covered in how a scheduled release is listed.

Who This Page Is Not For

Anyone looking for the current dots, the current median or the level implied for a given year will not find them here, and that is deliberate.

Anyone wanting a view on where rates are going is in the wrong place as well. This page explains a chart; it does not read one.

And anyone looking for the equivalent chart from another central bank should know that most do not publish one in this form. That difference, and when a central bank acts in the market itself, sit outside the projections entirely.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Fed dot plot?

It is a chart showing where each Federal Reserve policymaker thinks the target federal funds rate should appropriately sit for the close of this year, for each of the several years that follow, and for the longer run. Each dot is one person, the dots are anonymous, and the chart is published four times a year.

Does the dot plot commit the Fed to anything?

No. The dots are individual projections of what each person judges would be appropriate, not decisions, and nothing on the chart is voted on. The rate decision itself is taken separately and announced in the statement.

Why does the dot plot change every quarter?

Because it is collected fresh each time, from people whose views have moved and sometimes from a partly different group of people. The horizon also changes: the spring rounds reach two years ahead and the autumn rounds reach three.

Is the median dot the Fed forecast?

No. It is the middle value of a set of individual projections, each conditioned on its own author’s assumption about policy. It is not agreed by anyone and it carries no information about how far apart the dots around it are.

What should a currency trader look at instead of the level?

How spread out the dots are for a given year, whether the horizon just gained a column, and the growth, unemployment and inflation projections the rate path is conditioned on. Those survive the next release; a level does not.