The Summary of Economic Projections releases at 2:00 ET on FOMC days that fall in March, June, September, and December. The June 2026 SEP lands Wednesday afternoon. The median dot for the policy rate at year-end gets the headline. The three other pieces of the document carry more information than the median ever does: the central tendency, the full range, and the 70 percent uncertainty bands.
What gets published
Each FOMC participant submits a projection for real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, headline PCE inflation, and core PCE inflation for the current year and the next three calendar years, plus a longer-run value. Each participant also submits a projection for the appropriate policy rate path over the same horizon. The Federal Reserve Board staff aggregates the 19 individual submissions into three summary statistics for each variable and each year.
The median is the middle value. With 19 participants, the median is the 10th-ranked submission. The central tendency is the range remaining after dropping the three highest and three lowest projections, leaving the middle 13. The full range is the gap between the highest and lowest single submission. The 70 percent uncertainty bands, added in March 2024, show the historical empirical distribution of forecast errors around the median, scaled to a 70 percent confidence interval.
The central tendency carries the consensus signal
The central tendency is the cleanest read of committee consensus. By construction it excludes the three most aggressive doves and the three most aggressive hawks. The width of the central tendency tells you how unified the middle 13 are. A narrow central tendency on the 2026 funds rate (the June 2024 SEP showed a 25 basis point band on the 2024 dot) signals that the middle of the Committee has converged on a single answer. A wide central tendency (the December 2023 SEP showed a 75 basis point band on the 2024 dot) signals an unresolved internal argument.
The width of the central tendency moves more meaningfully than the median does over a forecast cycle. A median that holds flat from one SEP to the next, with a central tendency that narrowed by 25 basis points, prints as a meaningful coalescence even though the headline line stayed put. Reporters miss this almost every release.
The full range tells you where the tails are
The full range is the gap between the most hawkish and the most dovish projection. The two endpoints of the range, by definition, are not part of the central tendency. They are the participants who hold the most isolated views.
The full range matters when the dispersion is asymmetric. If the median 2027 dot sits at 3.25 percent, the central tendency runs 3.00 to 3.50, and the full range runs 2.50 to 4.25, the right tail is twice as far from the center as the left tail. That asymmetry usually persists across SEPs because it reflects a specific participant whose framework differs from the median. The September 2023 SEP showed a 175 basis point right tail on the 2024 dot, which the press treated as noise. The participant carrying that dot turned out to be Michelle Bowman, and her view became the policy floor for the next 14 months.
The full range is where minority positions get encoded. Watching the same outlier persist across three or four releases is a signal that the Committee has a structural disagreement, not a one-meeting noise distribution.
The 70 percent uncertainty bands quantify what the Fed does not know
The 70 percent bands are derived from a 20-year history of FOMC forecast errors and Blue Chip consensus errors at the same horizon. For the year-end funds rate one year out, the historical 70 percent band is approximately plus or minus 200 basis points. Two years out, the band widens to plus or minus 250 basis points. Three years out, the band exceeds plus or minus 300 basis points.
What that means in practice: when the June 2026 SEP shows a 2027 median funds rate of 3.25 percent, the 70 percent band runs roughly 0.75 to 5.75 percent. The Fed is publishing, in writing, that there is a 30 percent chance the true 2027 rate sits outside that range. That uncertainty is not commentary, it is the Committee’s own assessment. Treating the median as a forecast rather than as a midpoint of a very wide distribution is the most common mistake in SEP coverage.
Reading Wednesday’s release
The Committee meets June 16 and 17 with a decision and SEP at 2:00 ET Wednesday. The March 2026 SEP carried a 2026 median funds rate at 4.625 percent, a central tendency of 4.375 to 5.125, and a longer-run median at 3.00. The 2027 median sat at 3.875 percent with a central tendency of 3.375 to 4.625. The fed-funds futures curve closed Tuesday with the 2026 cuts implied at 1.9, against the 1.5 cuts the March median carried.
The four numbers to read Wednesday, in order: how the 2026 central tendency width changed, where the 2026 full range endpoints sit, whether the long-run median moved off 3.00, and how the longer-run central tendency width compares to March. Move on to the median dots after that. The dispersion is the news.