Past research suggests that the FOMC forward policy guidance has influenced public expectations about future policy (Campbell et al. 2012). Given the importance of the latest FOMC communications about liftoff, it is natural to ask whether the FOMC’s views line up with expectations from surveys. In the September 2013 Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey of business economists, the consensus unemployment rate forecast for the fourth quarter of 2014 was 6.8%. A simple extrapolation of the survey’s forecast path suggests that the unemployment rate should drop below the FOMC’s 6.5% threshold around the middle of 2015. These business economists further indicated that the third quarter of 2015 is the most likely time for liftoff. Additional surveys of private-sector economists conducted by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and others paint a similar picture of liftoff expectations.