Economic Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

FRED® API

General Documentation | API | Toolkits

The FRED® API is a web service that allows developers to write programs and build applications that retrieve economic data from the FRED® and ALFRED® websites hosted by the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Requests can be customized according to data source, release, category, series, and other preferences.

General Documentation

• Overview
• What is FRED®?
• What is ALFRED®?
• FRED® versus ALFRED®
• Real-Time Periods
• Errors

API

Categories

• fred/category - Get a category.
• fred/category/children - Get the child categories for a specified parent category.
• fred/category/related - Get the related categories for a category.
• fred/category/series - Get the series in a category.

Releases

• fred/releases - Get all releases of economic data.
• fred/releases/dates - Get release dates for all releases of economic data.
• fred/release - Get a release of economic data.
• fred/release/dates - Get release dates for a release of economic data.
• fred/release/series - Get the series on a release of economic data.
• fred/release/sources - Get the sources for a release of economic data.

Series

• fred/series - Get an economic data series.
• fred/series/categories - Get the categories for an economic data series.
• fred/series/observations - Get the observations or data values for an economic data series.
• fred/series/release - Get the release for an economic data series.
• fred/series/search - Get economic data series that match keywords.
• fred/series/updates - Get economic data series sorted in descending order of when transactions to update data values where processed on the FRED® server.
• fred/series/vintagedates - Get the dates in history when a series' data values were revised or new data values were released.

Sources

• fred/sources - Get all sources of economic data.
• fred/source - Get a source of economic data.
• fred/source/releases - Get the releases for a source.

Toolkits

FRED® API toolkits allow you to write programs that communicate with the FRED® API server. These toolkits know how to structure requests and parse responses. This allows you to focus on setting the options you want while avoiding many technical details.

If you've developed a free open source toolkit for the FRED® API, let us know. We will include a link on this page if we find your software useful to others.

PHP

• FRED® API Toolkit for PHP - Developed and maintained by the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis under the BSD license.