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FRED API (St. Louis Fed)

800,000+ economic time series, one free key

FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis exposes 800,000+ economic time series from 100+ sources: interest rates, inflation (CPI), unemployment, GDP, exchange rates, and more, plus the ALFRED point-in-time archive. REST, JSON or XML. Requires a free API key.

Free tier

Free key

Rate limits

120 requests/minute per key (HTTP 429 above that, with a temporary block)

Auth

API key

Base URL

https://api.stlouisfed.org/fred

What you'd build with it

  • Pull CPI/inflation, rates or unemployment into a finance assistant
  • Chart macroeconomic indicators in a dashboard
  • Trigger automations on new economic data releases
  • Search for the right series_id from a natural-language query

Key endpoints

  • GET/series/observations?series_id={id}&api_key={KEY}&file_type=jsonObservations (the actual time series values)
  • GET/series?series_id={id}&api_key={KEY}&file_type=jsonSeries metadata (title, units, frequency)
  • GET/series/search?search_text={q}&api_key={KEY}&file_type=jsonSearch for series by keyword
  • GET/category/series?category_id={id}&api_key={KEY}&file_type=jsonList series within a category
Members

Members get the runnable recipe

Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.

Tags

economicsfinancegovernmentopen-data