WASHINGTON – Last week's Labor Department report showing U.S. employers added 214,000 workers to payrolls in October reinforced economists' expectations that the Federal Reserve will start raising interest rates in mid-2015.

"We still expect the Fed is going to hike at the June meeting," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc. in Lexington, Mass. "The Fed will look at the report as encouraging in terms of the strength of the economy."

Job gains are heading for their biggest annual gain in 15 years as policymakers weigh how much labor-market strength is sufficient for them to raise the main interest rate for the first time since 2006.

Unemployment fell to a six-year low of 5.8 percent in October, Friday's report showed. The rate has dropped 1.4 percentage points since October 2013, matching the biggest 12-month retreat since 1984.

"That gets us that much closer to a more natural sustainable rate of unemployment associated with full employment in the 5.25 percent range," said Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Fed. "So we've got some distance to go, but we've closed a lot of it over a relatively short period of time within the last year, and that's good news."

Evans has often warned of the dangers of tightening policy prematurely and is one of two Fed officials who's predicted that the federal funds rate won't rise until 2016. Fourteen of 17 officials see an increase next year, according to projections released in September.

Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York, cited the Labor Department's aggregate weekly payrolls index, which takes into account hours, earnings and employment. It was up 4.8 percent in the 12 months through October, marking the strongest gain since March 2012.

"I don't think it changes anything for the Fed," Porcelli said of the jobs report. A former Federal Reserve Bank of New York researcher, he correctly projected October's drop in unemployment and expects an interest rate increase in mid-2015.

"It was a pretty solid jobs report across the board," Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, who votes on policy this year, said Friday in a CNBC interview.

The unemployment rate has fallen to near the level most Fed officials consider full employment, dropping from a 26-year high of 10 percent in October 2009. The central bank has held rates near zero since December 2008 and boosted its balance sheet to $4.49 trillion. Policymakers ended their third round of quantitative easing at their last meeting on Oct. 28-29.