🏦 BIS Central Bank Policy Rates Scraper

The policy rate of any central bank the BIS tracks, one observation per row, back to the 1950s. Pick a country code and daily or monthly frequency, and the Actor returns date, rate and country as a flat table. No API key, no registration, no stitching spreadsheets.

The Bank for International Settlements publishes the WS_CBPOL series, the official policy rate for around 40 economies. Reading it by hand means clicking through country pages and merging downloads. This Actor pulls the series you ask for and writes each observation into a dataset you can open in Excel or load into a model.

Who uses it	What they use the series for
💼 Acquisition entrepreneurs and search funds	Checking what the base rate on acquisition debt has done, and where it sat when a comp was priced
📊 Deal analysts	Anchoring a discount rate or a debt schedule to a published number rather than a recollection
🌍 Cross border buyers	Comparing the cost of money in the target's country against their own before modelling
📈 Economists and quants	Building a single panel of global policy rates with one schema across every country

📋 What it does

💡 Why it matters: the rate on an acquisition loan moves with the central bank. A dated series of the base rate is the cheapest way to sanity check what a seller's historical interest expense should have been.

• 🌍 Filters by BIS country code. US, GB, JP, XM for the euro area, or leave it empty for every country the BIS covers.
• 📅 Daily or monthly. D gives the rate on each business day, M gives the monthly series.
• 🔢 You cap the run with a single number, so a test costs cents.
• 🧱 One schema for every country, so several runs stack into one table without cleaning columns.
• 📦 One row per observation, with the country and frequency repeated on each row for easy filtering.
• 💾 Exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, from the run page or the API.

📊 Output

Every observation is one flat row.

Field	Type	Description
🌍 country	string	BIS country code for the series, for example US
📅 frequency	string	D for daily or M for monthly, as requested
🗓 date	string	Observation date. 1954-07 on a monthly series, a full date on a daily one
💹 policy_rate	number	The policy rate in percent, for example 1.44
🏛 source	string	Always BIS WS_CBPOL, the series the row came from
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection
⚠️ error	string	null on a normal row

Example rows

{
  "country": "US",
  "frequency": "M",
  "date": "1954-07",
  "policy_rate": 0.25,
  "source": "BIS WS_CBPOL",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T16:11:34.935Z",
  "error": null
}

{
  "country": "US",
  "frequency": "M",
  "date": "1954-08",
  "policy_rate": 1.44,
  "source": "BIS WS_CBPOL",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T16:11:35.032Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

	What you get
The official series	Rates come from the BIS warehouse, not from a news article or a screenshot.
No credentials	Reads the public BIS data endpoint. No registration, no token to rotate.
Seven fields, every country	The same columns whether you pull US or all 40, so the rows stack.
Decades of history	Series often begin in the 1940s or 1950s, so a long rate cycle fits in one export.
You pay per row	No subscription. A ten row test costs under a dime.

🚀 How to use it

1. Create a free Apify account. New accounts start with $5 of credit.
2. Open the Actor and select Try for free.
3. Set country to a BIS code, or clear it to collect every country.
4. Set frequency to M or D, and maxItems to cap the run.
5. Select Start, then export from the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

A first run:

{
  "country": "US",
  "frequency": "M",
  "maxItems": 10
}

A full monthly history for the euro area:

{
  "country": "XM",
  "frequency": "M",
  "maxItems": 1000
}

⚙️ Input

Field	Required	Description
country	No	BIS country code, for example US, XM for the euro area, GB, JP. Leave empty for all
frequency	No	D for daily or M for monthly. Default M
maxItems	No	Maximum observations to collect per run. Default 10

💰 Pricing

Pay per result. No subscription, and no Apify platform usage on top.

Apify plan	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
Per observation row	$0.0085	$0.0082	$0.0078	$0.0075	$0.0075	$0.0075

Rows collected	Cost on the Free plan
100	$0.85
1,000	$8.50
10,000	$85.00

Free plan runs return up to 10 rows as a preview. Any paid Apify plan lifts that to 1,000,000 per run.

🔌 Integrate with any app

The dataset is available through the Apify API as soon as the run finishes. Use run-sync-get-dataset-items for a one-shot call, webhooks to trigger what happens next, or the Make, Zapier, Airbyte and LangChain integrations listed on the Actor page.

🤖 Use with an AI agent

Give an agent live access to the series over the Model Context Protocol:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=acquistion-automation/bis-policy-rates-scraper"

Then ask it in plain language for a country's policy rate history and have it read the result back.

❓ Frequently asked questions

The first rows I got are from the 1950s. Where is the current rate? The series is returned oldest first, so a small maxItems stops in the early history. Raise maxItems until the run reaches the present, then sort by date descending.

Which country codes work? The BIS uses short codes such as US, GB, JP and XM for the euro area. They are case sensitive. Leaving country empty collects every country the BIS covers.

Why did I get fewer rows than maxItems? maxItems is a cap, not a target. The run also stops when the BIS data for that country and frequency is exhausted.

Why does the daily series have gaps? The BIS publishes daily policy rates for business days. Weekends and national holidays have no observation.

Do I need a BIS account? No. The Actor reads the same public endpoint that serves the BIS statistics portal.

What can I export? CSV, Excel, JSON and XML from the run page, or JSON straight from the API.

🔗 More from Acquisition Automation Co.

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• BizBuySell Scraper

About Acquisition Automation Co.

We build automation for people buying businesses. The repetitive part of an acquisition search, checking listings, pulling public records, tracking owners and assets, is work a machine should do, so the buyer's time goes into judging deals instead of collecting them.

We add new Actors regularly. If there is a source you need and do not see here, tell us.

🆘 Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab of this Actor with your run ID, the input you used, and what you expected to get back.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Bank for International Settlements. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using that data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable law.