The Federal Open Market Committee’s Summary of Economic Projections is a quarterly report that gathers each FOMC participant’s individual forecasts for GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and the federal funds rate, then summarizes those forecasts using medians, central tendencies, and ranges. It is released four times a year alongside the committee’s policy statement, and it includes the dot plot, distribution charts, fan charts, and qualitative assessments of uncertainty and risk. The projections are individual judgments, not a committee plan.
What’s Inside the Report
The main table is organized around four variables tied to the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate under 12 U.S.C. § 225a to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 12 USC 225a – Maintenance of Long Run Growth of Monetary and Credit Aggregates For each variable, projections are shown across the current year, the next three years, and a “longer run” horizon that captures where participants think the economy settles once temporary shocks fade.
Three summary statistics appear for every variable:
- The median: the middle projection when all submissions are sorted from lowest to highest, or the average of the two middle values when the number of participants is even.
- The central tendency: a narrower band that drops the three highest and three lowest projections, filtering out outliers.
- The range: the full spread from the lowest to the highest projection submitted.
Read together, these three tell you whether the committee broadly agrees or is split. A tight central tendency with a wide range means most participants see things similarly while a few hold very different views.2Federal Reserve. Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections
Real GDP growth is reported as the annual percentage change in output adjusted for inflation. The longer-run figure is the pace participants believe the economy can sustain without pushing inflation up or unemployment down over time. Unemployment projections work the same way: the longer-run number is the rate participants view as consistent with stable inflation once shocks have faded, and near-term projections above that level signal an expectation that the labor market will stay softer than its sustainable level for a while.
Inflation is reported using the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index rather than the Consumer Price Index. The Fed prefers PCE because it adapts more quickly to shifts in how Americans actually spend, rather than relying on a fixed basket of goods.3Federal Reserve. Economy at a Glance – Inflation (PCE) Both headline PCE and core PCE (which strips out food and energy) appear in the table, and the 2 percent inflation target the committee adopted in January 2012 is the benchmark against which those projected rates should be read.4Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve Issues FOMC Statement of Longer-Run Goals and Policy Strategy
How To Read the Dot Plot
Each dot on the federal funds rate chart represents one participant’s judgment of where the rate should stand at the end of a given year, plus a “longer run” column for the steady-state rate. Dots are anonymous. Clusters at a given level suggest agreement; a scattered pattern signals real disagreement about the right path.
An important detail often missed: every member of the Board of Governors and every Federal Reserve Bank president submits projections, regardless of whether they hold a policy vote at that meeting. Up to 19 people supply dots, but only 12 cast votes on the rate decision at any given meeting.2Federal Reserve. Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections So the dot plot captures a broader set of views than the actual policy vote does, and the median dot doesn’t necessarily predict the next rate decision.
Initial projections are due by the end of the day on the Friday before the meeting. Participants can revise up until the morning of the meeting’s second day, incorporating fresh data or points raised in committee discussion.5Federal Reserve. FAQs: Summary of Economic Projections Each forecast rests on what that individual considers the most appropriate path for policy, not on a preset consensus. The Fed itself describes each dot as one participant’s “assessment of appropriate monetary policy” rather than a committee commitment.6Federal Reserve. FOMC Projections Materials Treating the dot plot as a rate roadmap is one of the most common misreadings.
Uncertainty, Risks, and Fan Charts
Since November 2011, the SEP has included qualitative assessments alongside the point estimates. Each participant marks whether their uncertainty about each variable is lower than, broadly similar to, or higher than historical norms, and whether risks to the outcome are weighted to the downside, broadly balanced, or weighted to the upside. The SEP reports these views as percentages across response categories.
The assessments are directional. They tell you whether the group feels more or less uncertain than usual, but not by how much. If a large share of participants flags upside risk to inflation, it means many of them believe inflation is more likely to overshoot their own baseline than to undershoot it.
The fan charts show 70 percent confidence bands around the median projection for GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation, built from the average size of historical forecast errors over the prior 20 years.7Federal Reserve. The FOMC’s Fan Charts for Economic Projections Even when the median looks precise, the shaded band is a reminder that actual outcomes have landed outside that range roughly 30 percent of the time historically. For the federal funds rate fan chart, the band may be narrower if it has been cut off at zero.
When the SEP Is Released
The FOMC meets eight times a year but publishes projections only four times, at the March, June, September, and December meetings.2Federal Reserve. Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections The quarterly cadence lines up with fresh economic data and gives participants enough time between releases to meaningfully update their views.
The 2026 SEP meetings are:
- March 17–18
- June 16–17
- September 15–16
- December 8–9
The dates are posted in advance on the Federal Reserve’s website.8Federal Reserve. Meeting Calendars and Information Each new SEP also shows the previous release’s projections as dashed lines in the distribution charts, so shifts between meetings are visible at a glance.2Federal Reserve. Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections
On the second day of each SEP meeting, the release sequence runs on a fixed clock. At 2:00 PM Eastern Time, the policy statement and the full set of projections come out simultaneously; every market participant and news service receives the data at the same instant.9Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve Issues FOMC Statement The Fed Chair’s press conference follows at 2:30 PM Eastern, leaving a 30-minute window in which the public can review the raw numbers before hearing the Chair’s interpretation.
Where To Find the SEP and Historical Data
The official source is the Federal Reserve Board’s website. From the Monetary Policy section, the Meeting Calendars and Information page links each past meeting to its associated documents in both HTML and PDF form. The PDF carries the complete set of tables, the dot plot, the distribution charts, and the fan charts, along with an addendum that gives more context than the initial press release.2Federal Reserve. Guide to the Summary of Economic Projections
For historical comparisons, the St. Louis Fed’s ALFRED database (Archival FRED) lets you pull and graph SEP data across releases. Series names include “FOMC Growth” for real GDP projections, “FOMC unemployment” for the unemployment rate, “FOMC Consumption” for core PCE inflation, and “FOMC Fed Funds Rate” for the federal funds rate. Selecting different vintages shows how the median forecast for a given year has evolved from one meeting to the next.10Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, September 2025 Tracking those revisions is one of the more useful exercises for seeing how the committee’s outlook actually changes over time.