Fed Dot Plot December 2026: 2027 Is the News

Search for the Fed dot plot and you get explainers. I read the three strongest pages on the query this morning: one is an evergreen definition piece with no current numbers and no date for the next release, one is a reference site that prints the September, June and March tables correctly and never says what changed between them, and the top broker result now redirects to a hub page with no dot plot article on it at all.

None of them tells you the thing that actually decides how December 9 trades, which is that the 2026 dot is already written. September's median of 4.1% is the midpoint of a 4.00-4.25% target range, and that range is one quarter-point hike from where the Fed sits today. If the committee hikes on December 9, as both exchanges price at better than seven in ten, its own end-2026 median does not have to move at all.

So the news on December 9 is 2027, the longer run, and whether a dot plot gets published at all. I pulled September's projection table out of the Fed's PDF, the three previous rounds for the trend, Kalshi's ladder on the median, both exchanges' decision ladders, the Treasury curve and every release scheduled before the meeting, then did the arithmetic that turns a quarter-point grid into a printed dot.

What Lands on December 9, and When

The Summary of Economic Projections comes out four times a year, at the March, June, September and December meetings. The dot plot is Figure 2 of that document: one dot per participant per year, each one that person's view of the appropriate midpoint of the target range at the end of the calendar year. December's edition is the fourth and last of 2026.

The timing matters if you intend to trade it. Statement and projections drop together at 2:00pm ET, in one PDF, and Kalshi's market on the median stops trading at 1:55pm ET, five minutes before.

The October 27-28 meeting comes first and publishes nothing. Both venues price it at a 91.5% hold, which is as close to settled as a Fed meeting gets. Next year's dates get the same treatment in our 2027 FOMC meeting schedule.

Where September Left the Dots

Here is September's Table 1, with June underneath. This is the baseline December gets measured against, and it is the table nobody on the search results page bothers to difference.

The revision from June to September was the largest in this cycle: 30 basis points on 2026 and 50 on both 2027 and 2028. September also added a 2029 column, which June did not collect, and nudged the longer-run dot from 3.1% to 3.2%.

Two of those numbers are worth holding against reality. The committee projects unemployment at 4.1% for the fourth quarter, and September printed 4.2%. It projects PCE inflation at 3.7%, and August came in at 3.42%. The labour market is already slightly worse than the dots assume and inflation a little cooler, which is the combination that argues against the median going up again.

The 2026 Dot Is Already Set, and Here Is the Arithmetic

This is the part the explainers skip, and it is why December's 2026 line is close to predetermined. The Fed's own note to Table 1 says the rate projections are the midpoint of the projected appropriate target range, and that range moves in quarter-point steps. So a single dot can only take certain values, printed to one decimal place.

Read the 4.1% row again. September's end-2026 median of 4.1% is a 4.00-4.25% target range, which is one hike above the 3.75-4.00% the Fed set at that same meeting. The committee was not forecasting a pause when it published 4.1%. It was saying, in the only units the dot plot has, that one more hike was coming before the year ended.

September's range column confirms it without needing a single press report. The 2026 dots ran 3.9% to 4.4%, and the central tendency, which drops the three highest and three lowest, ran 4.1% to 4.4%. Because that floor is 4.1%, at most three participants sat below it, so at least 15 of the 18 who submitted projected one more hike or more.

Only one 2026 meeting is left that can deliver that hike. With October priced as a hold, the committee validates its own September median on December 9, in the same hour it publishes the next one. Our December rate hike odds piece tracks that contract.

Kalshi Runs a Market on the Median Itself

Nothing on the search results page for this query mentions that you can trade the dot plot directly. You can. Kalshi lists a twelve-strike ladder, `KXDOTPLOT-26DEC`, on the question "What will the median be in the Fed's Dec 9, 2026 dot plot?" It resolves on the published median year-end 2026 federal funds rate projection, and its rules say in as many words that this is not the target range announced at the meeting.

Difference two of those rows and you get the shape. 80.5% says the median is above 4.0% and 21.5% says it is above 4.1%, which leaves roughly 59 points on it printing exactly 4.1%, 19.5 on 4.0% or lower and 21.5 on 4.2% or higher. The base case is that December reprints September's number.

Be honest about what that ladder can bear. Only the 4.0% and 4.1% strikes have real flow, and even the 4.1% book is 18 bid against 25 offered, a seven cent spread. Everything above 4.3% and below 3.8% is quoted two cents against five, which is a tick-size artefact rather than a forecast.

The grid above hides a third achievable value, and it explains why the 4.0% strike trades at all. Eighteen participants submitted in September, an even number, so the median is the average of the ninth and tenth dots. A committee split evenly between 3.875% and 4.125% gives 4.0%, a value no single dot can take.

Four Dot Plots, a 70 Basis Point Turn, and a Higher Neutral

A single dot plot tells you less than the sequence, so I pulled the last four projection tables from the Fed's own PDFs.

The end-2026 median went 3.4%, 3.4%, 3.8%, 4.1% across nine months, a 70 basis point hawkish revision. In December 2025 the committee's median saw 2026 ending below where the rate then stood, which is to say it expected to be cutting. It is now hiking instead, and the dots have been chasing the data rather than leading it.

The quieter line is the last one. The longer-run median moved from 3.0% to 3.1% to 3.2% across the same four rounds. That dot is not a forecast of anything datable: it is each participant's estimate of where rates settle once shocks wash out, the closest thing the Fed publishes to its view of neutral. Ten basis points sounds like nothing and is not, because every other dot is anchored to it.

Where the Market and the Dots Actually Disagree

To compare a dot with a market you have to turn a ladder of probabilities into a rate. I weighted each outcome on both exchanges by its move in basis points, normalised for the fact that neither book sums to exactly 100%, and chained the result forward from today's 3.875% midpoint.

On 2026 there is barely a disagreement to report. Polymarket implies 4.09% at year end, Kalshi 4.08%, and the Fed's median says 4.1%. Three independent estimates inside two basis points, and the band has held between 4.08% and 4.12% across five separate pulls on this site since early October.

2027 is where the two stories come apart. The Fed's September median has the funds rate at 4.1% at the end of 2027, identical to its end-2026 number, so the committee projects a full year with no net change. Both exchanges have the rate at about 4.16% after the January 26-27 meeting alone. The market is not forecasting a different destination so much as arriving early and then having nowhere to go but down. December's dots can confirm that or kill it.

The bond market sits with the exchanges. The three-month bill closed at 4.22% on October 22 against an effective federal funds rate of 3.88%, and a bill cannot out-yield the overnight rate by 34 basis points unless that rate is expected to rise. The ten-year, meanwhile, has rallied from its 2026 high of 5.31% on October 5 to 4.96%: the front end still prices the hike, the long end prices what follows.

Every Number the Committee Sees Before December 9

Participants submit in the days before the meeting, so the dots are a function of a known and finite set of data.

Two features of that calendar do real work. The committee gets exactly one CPI print, on November 10, and the Cleveland Fed's nowcast has it at 3.75% headline and 2.48% core, leaving September's 3.72% essentially unchanged. And the November CPI arrives on December 10, the morning after the dots are published.

On the measure the Fed actually targets, the nowcast has October core PCE at 3.13% against the committee's 3.4% projection. If that holds, participants sit down in December with core inflation undershooting their own September forecast and unemployment overshooting it. Our core PCE inflation piece has the ladder on that print, and the macro release calendar carries every date above.

The Chair Has No Dot, and the Dot Plot May Not Survive

There is a reason Kalshi wrote a no-projections clause into a contract about a document the Fed has published quarterly since 2012. Chair Kevin Warsh has declined to submit a dot at both meetings he has chaired, in June and again in September, on the grounds that an individual projection is not helpful to the conduct of policy. September's table records eighteen submissions, one short of the full complement.

That absence is not a curiosity, it is a measurement problem. The median is the average of the ninth and tenth dots, and removing one participant from a pool of nineteen changes which dots those are. The one person whose vote reliably carries the committee is the one whose projection you cannot read.

The broader question is whether there is a dot plot to read at all. The June statement dropped forward guidance, and a Fed communications review is weighing whether the quarterly rate-path projections should continue. If that lands before December 9 and the committee acts, Kalshi's ladder resolves entirely to No and every number here becomes a historical note. We priced the chair's own appointment through the same kind of contract in who will be the next Fed chair.

My read is that December publishes normally: scrapping the projections in the same release that validates a 70 basis point hawkish revision would hand the committee two stories to explain at one press conference, and the review has not reported. But the clause is in the contract for a reason.

How to Read the December 9 Dot Plot in Ninety Seconds

The document runs seventeen pages and the market reprices in thirty seconds. Read it in this order.

1. Check the end-2026 median against 4.1%. If it prints 4.1% nothing has happened: that is September's number and what a December hike produces. 4.0% or 3.9% means a bloc has given up on the hike they just delivered. 4.4% puts a second one on the table.
2. Then go straight to 2027. September said 4.1%, the same as 2026: a flat year. A move to 4.4% endorses the market's early arrival; a move toward 3.9% says the committee intends to start cutting and the market has the route wrong.
3. Read the longer-run dot. It has gone 3.0%, 3.1%, 3.2% across four rounds. Another rise is the most durable signal in the document, and the one with the longest reach into mortgage and credit pricing.
4. Count the range, not just the median. September's 2026 range was 3.9% to 4.4%, central tendency 4.1% to 4.4%. A widening range means the committee is fracturing even where the median holds still.
5. Check whether the chair submitted a dot. Nineteen submissions instead of eighteen would be a real change of transparency policy, and would move the median by changing which dots are ninth and tenth.
6. Compare it with the dissent market. Polymarket's December dissent book prices 53% on nobody dissenting and 24.9% on exactly one. A hawkish dot plot alongside several dissents is a committee agreed on a number but not on the reason for it.

Then stop. The dots are not a plan, and the Fed says so in the note to its own table: they are individual assessments collected at a moment in time. September revised 2027 by half a point in a single quarter, which is the best available evidence of how fast they move.

For the current level rather than the projection, federal reserve interest rates 2026 carries the live target range, and live Fed decision odds updates each meeting's ladder without waiting for a new article.