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Federal Reserve Economic Data
(FRED)

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Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) - Overview & Setup

Please note: "This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis."

Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is a economic data database maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It contains 824,000 US and international time series from 114 data sources.

Datasets include all of the major market moving economic statistics such as Inflation (CPI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Industrial Production, Initial Claims, Unemployment and Nonfarm Payrolls.

Finding Datasets

The easiest way to find a dataset is to use the "Search" box on the FRED tab. Press the "Configuation Pane" button on the ExcelPriceFeed tab in Excel and then select the FRED tab.

Here you can enter a search term, for example "US CPI":

The result list shows all the datasets containing the search term, ordered by popularity (column "Pop") - so the most popular datasets are shown at the top.

Select a dataset and the name and description will be shown below.

Understanding FRED data

The datasets available via FRED are generally lists of date and value pairs. The type of data is dependent on the dataset.

For example if we look at US non-farm payrolls, which is a measure of the current number of employees in the US economy, we can see that for this dataset:

Units are "Thousands of persons"
Frequency is Monthly
The data is seasonally adjusted

Understanding the Excel Price Feed FRED formulas

Click the Excel icon to download a sample spreadsheet with all Excel Price Feed FRED formulas.

Once you have found a dataset, you can use the formula buttons to insert a formula into your spreadsheet.

There are two types of formuals: historical formulas which return a time series of points and single point formulas.

Historical Time Series Formulas

We'll start by looking at the historical time series formulas:

FRED Excel Price Feed time-series historical Excel formulas

In the spreadsheet below we have inserted the various FRED historical formulas to demonstrate how they work, referencing the US non-farm payroll dataset (all values are in 1000s of persons):

FRED non-farm payrolls Excel formula example

We can see that for June 2024, total non-farm payrolls were 158,638,000 which was a change of 206,000 on the previous month, or a 0.13% month on month increase.

The annual increase, since June 2023, was 2,611,000 or 1.67%

Looking at each column, we can see which formula is used:

Date Period (Column A): Frequency is monthly. This always the first column of all the time series formulas.
Values (B): These are the actual values for each month, using the EPF.FRED.HistoricLookback formula
Change (C): This is the change each month (from one month to the next) using the FRED.HistoricLookback.Change formula
% Change (F): This is the % change each month (from one month to the next) using the FRED.HistoricLookback.PercentChange formula
% Change Year Ago (H): This is the % change from a year ago, so row 2 shows the % change from Jun 2023 to June 2024, using the FRED.HistoricLookback.PercentChange.YearAgo formula
Change Year Ago (J): This is the actual (value) change from a year ago, using the FRED.HistoricLookback.Change.YearAgo formula

Single Data Point Formulas

Excel Price Feed also includes a set of formulas to return a single FRED datapoint:

In the spreadsheet below we have inserted the various FRED single data point formulas, again referencing the US non-farm payroll dataset: