The LSE Directory / Data providers
FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) is a free public database maintained by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It aggregates, charts, and distributes economic and financial time series covering banking conditions, GDP, inflation, employment and population, interest rates, monetary aggregates, exchange rates, producer prices, and international trade. As of mid-2026 the platform lists roughly 845,000 series from about 121 source organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Zillow, and the National Association of Realtors, alongside the Federal Reserve System's own releases. Users can chart, download in several formats, and embed any series; a public REST API and third-party client libraries for R, Python, Ruby, and Julia extend it into research and analytical workflows. FRED does not produce original economic statistics; it specialises in aggregating and standardising data already published by other government and private sources, then making full history and revisions easy to retrieve for free. Its companion tool ALFRED (Archival FRED) preserves vintage snapshots of each series exactly as they existed on a given release date, letting a researcher reconstruct what a data point looked like before subsequent revisions, a feature few other free platforms offer. GeoFRED adds county, metro, and state level mapping of selected series, and FRASER is a sister digital archive of historical Federal Reserve publications. Because it is run by a Federal Reserve Bank rather than a commercial vendor, FRED carries no paywall or seat licensing, which has made it a standard reference in economics teaching and a no-cost data source for quantitative researchers, journalists, and analysts who would otherwise rely on subscription terminals for the same series. FRED began on April 18, 1991, as a free dial-up electronic bulletin board offering 30 data series to an initial 620 users over 14.4 kbps modems. It moved onto the World Wide Web in the summer of 1995 with roughly 865 series and about 6,000 weekly visits, at its first web address, http://www.stls.frb.org/fred/. A mobile app followed for iPad and iPhone in September 2011 and for Android in January 2012. FRED is operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, one of the twelve regional Reserve Banks in the U.S. Federal Reserve System, and remains free with no registration requirement. More recently, FRED's Research Information Services team has formalised distribution partnerships with other federal statistical agencies: the Federal Reserve Board of Governors adopted FRED in 2024 as its tool for disseminating Data Download Program (DDP) data, and the U.S. Census Bureau partnered with the team to distribute its re-engineered Annual Integrated Economic Survey, intended to replace seven separate annual business surveys, through FRED.
