US real GDP growth in 2036?

The best anchor available today is the Fed’s longer-run growth estimate of 2.0%, which is unusually relevant for a 2036 question because official year-specific forecasts do not extend that far. That makes a mid-2% outcome plausible but not dominant: the Fed is still effectively saying the economy’s sustainable pace is around trend, not in a structurally higher growth regime. Recent near-term data have been stronger, including a 5.1% annualized Atlanta Fed GDPNow reading for Q3 2026, but that is momentum, not a decade-ahead regime shift. On balance, the most defensible view is that 2036 growth clusters around 2%, with the largest probability mass in the 1.6% to 2.5% range.

Arguments for a higher bucket are real. AI-driven productivity improvements could lift trend growth above the Fed’s long-run estimate, and the current expansion has shown more resilience than many expected. If capital deepening, software adoption, and automation compound over years, 2.1% to 2.5% becomes more likely than a strict reading of the Fed’s 2.0% anchor would suggest. That said, claims of a sustained move to 3% plus are still speculative, and the structural drag from demographics, debt, and slower labor-force growth argues against assuming a major breakout.

The current market looks somewhat conservative on the upside. A 19% price on 1.6% to 2.0% versus 10% on 2.1% to 2.5% appears to underweight the possibility that productivity surprises modestly to the upside over the next decade. I do not think the market is wildly mispriced, because trend growth near 2% remains the most likely single outcome, but I would shift some probability from the lower-trend bucket into the 2.1% to 2.5% range and slightly reduce the odds of sub-1.5% outcomes relative to the market.