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FRED® FAQs

What is FRED®?

FRED® is a database of over 20,000 U.S. economic time series (1,000 macro series and 19,000 regional series). With FRED®, you can download data in Microsoft Excel and text formats and view charts of data series. We plan to continually improve FRED® and encourage you to be a part of the development process by sending feedback through our contact form.

If I have a question, who do I contact?

If you have questions about the data in the FRED® database, the Research staff prefers that you send an email to stlsFRED@stls.frb.org. If your question necessitates a phone discussion, please call a Research staff member. Staff are available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST.

• (314) 444-8590 for monetary data, interest rates, exchange rates, and international trade data.
• (314) 444-8573 for business/fiscal data, GDP, consumer and producer price indexes, and employment.
• (314) 444-8812 for banking, population, St. Louis district, and regional data.

Staff will respond to all email and telephone inquiries within one business day.

What is the date format?

All dates are represented as daily dates for consistency and ease of use. We chose a single date format that is widely supported by various spreadsheet applications (Excel, Lotus, etc.) and statistical software packages (SAS, Eviews, Stata, RATS, etc.). Many annual, quarterly, and monthly data series represent different times during the period (beginning of period, middle of period, etc.) so we chose to convert these frequencies to the first day of the period for consistency. The only exceptions are dates in the 8th District Banking Performance, Condition of Banks, and Federal Government Debt categories which are converted to the last day of the period. Dates for weekly and daily data series are natively daily dates and are not converted. Dates are formatted as YYYY-MM-DD. As an example, April 25, 2002 is represented as 2002-04-25.

Examples of how dates are converted to daily dates:

• For annual data, "2004" is represented as the daily date "2004-01-01," the first day of the first month of 2004.
• For quarterly data, the second quarter of 2005 is represented as the daily date "2005-04-01," the first day of the first month of the second quarter of 2005 (the first day of the second quarter of 2005).
• For monthly data, July 2005 is represented as "2005-07-01," the first day of the seventh month of 2005.

I would like to publish data found in FRED. What is the appropriate citation to use?

If you use our services to assemble data for research papers or presentations, please acknowledge that use by providing the following information for your readers:

• name of the data service and the St. Louis Fed (e.g., "FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis...")
• the name(s), mnemonic(s), data service URLs, and original source(s) for the data series
• the date accessed.

Citation example:

1. In the acknowledgments section for a paper or presentation:
   "The authors used the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) database from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to assemble the data used herein; see the data appendix and source notes for information on the specific series."
2. As a source note for tables, charts, appendices, etc.:
   "Data Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Civilian Unemployment Rate [UNRATE] ; U.S. Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics; http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/UNRATE; accessed September 17, 2009."

What is ALFRED® and how do I retrieve vintage data?

Using ALFRED - ArchivaL Federal Reserve Economic Data - you can retrieve a data series as it existed on a specific date in history. Vintage data can be downloaded directly from the ALFRED website or by using 'My Data Lists.' Please see ALFRED Help for information about ALFRED and how to download data directly from the ALFRED website, and the How to Use 'My Data Lists' tutorial.

What are 'My Data Lists' and how do I use them?

With a user account, you can store lists of economic data series. Data lists can be used to download series cross-tabulated by date or save links to series pages. See 'How to Use My Data Lists' for a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots.

What formulas are used to calculate growth rates?

Note that because FRED uses levels and rounded data as published by the source, calculations of percentage changes and/or growth rates in some series may not be identical to those in the original releases.

What dates are used for the US recession bars in FRED® graphs?

The NBER has not yet determined the end of the recession that began in December 2007. The date 2009-07-01 has been substituted in graphs as an estimate. This estimate is based on a statistical model for dating business cycle turning points developed by Marcelle Chauvet and Jeremy Piger (A Comparison of the Real-Time Performance of Business Cycle Dating Methods, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 2008, 26, 42-49). For more information, see http://www.uoregon.edu/~jpiger/us_recession_probs.htm

Other Topics

Updated Date

The "Updated" date associated with each series is the most recent date that a series was updated in FRED®. This date does not necessarily correspond to the dates of observations.

Obtaining more information about particular series

For detailed definitions and methodology beyond that provided in the "Notes" with each series in FRED®, we recommend referring to the source of the data.

Inflation rate calculation

The inflation rate is typically calculated as the percent rate of change between two observations of the Consumer Price Index (typically from month to month or from the same month one year ago). Conventions used in our publications for calculating rates of change are available in the Tables of Contents of our Monetary Trends and our National Economic Trends publications.

Money stock

Information on money stock measures, the monetary base and reserves, retail and deposit sweeps programs, and the monetary services index can be found in the Monetary Aggregates section of our website. Also included are historical data, references to further reading, and several datasets which are not included in the FRED® database.

What is FRASER?