Economic Calendar

Official Economic Calendar is an economic calendar API that returns official economic release events — Employment, Inflation (CPI, PPI, Core PCE), GDP, Retail Sales, Industrial Production, Housing Starts, Trade Balance, Consumer Sentiment, Wage Growth, Jobless Claims, and central bank rate decisions — sourced directly from primary statistical authorities: the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) for the United States and the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) / Bank of England for the United Kingdom — the same data trading desks, analysts and researchers use as ground truth. Unlike a scraped forex/trading economic calendar website, every event links back to its original government release. Pick a date range as wide as you need (multiple years of history, or upcoming scheduled releases), one or more countries, and one or more indicators, and get every matching event back as structured data ready for backtesting, dashboards, or alerting. Eurozone and France coverage are on the roadmap.

Running on Apify means you get programmatic API access, scheduling to catch new releases automatically, integrations (Zapier/Make/Slack), and full run monitoring — with zero setup on your side: no API key to register, no rate limits to manage yourself.

Why use this Actor?

• Backtesting & quant research — pull years of official release dates and actual values in one call to test how markets historically reacted around specific indicators.
• Trading dashboards & alerts — schedule runs to catch newly published figures the moment they're released.
• Reliable, primary-source data — everything comes from each country's own statistical authority (FRED, ONS, Bank of England), not a third-party aggregator, so figures are authoritative and traceable back to the original release.
• No maintenance overhead — official statistical APIs are stable and don't change their HTML layout under you the way scraped websites do.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start) on the Actor page.
2. Set From date / To date for the period you want to analyze — this can span multiple years.
3. Optionally select one or more Countries (United States, United Kingdom). Leave empty to get all of them.
4. Optionally select one or more Indicators (18 available across both countries — employment, inflation, growth, trade, sentiment, and central bank rate decisions; see the Input table below for the full list). Leave empty to get all indicators available for the selected countries.
5. Click Start and wait for the run to finish.
6. Open the Dataset tab to view, filter, and export the results.

Input

Field	Type	Description
countries	array	Which countries to include (US, GB). Empty = all.
dateFrom	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	Start of the date range.
dateTo	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	End of the date range.
categories	array	Which indicators to include. Empty = all available for the selected countries. Country-specific indicators (e.g. NFP) are only fetched for the countries they apply to. See the full list below.
maxEventsPerCategory	integer	Safety cap per indicator per country. 0 = unlimited within the date range.

Available categories values:

Code	Indicator	Countries
NFP	Non-Farm Payrolls	US
UNEMPLOYMENT_RATE	Unemployment Rate	US, GB
CPI	Consumer Price Index	US, GB
PPI	Producer Price Index	US
GDP	Gross Domestic Product	US, GB
FED_FUNDS_RATE	Federal Funds Rate Decision	US
BOE_BANK_RATE	Bank of England Bank Rate Decision	GB
RETAIL_SALES	Retail Sales	US, GB
INDUSTRIAL_PRODUCTION	Industrial Production	US, GB
HOUSING_STARTS	Housing Starts	US
DURABLE_GOODS_ORDERS	Durable Goods Orders	US
TRADE_BALANCE	Trade Balance	US
CONSUMER_SENTIMENT	Consumer Sentiment (University of Michigan)	US
AVERAGE_HOURLY_EARNINGS	Average Hourly Earnings	US
CORE_PCE_PRICE_INDEX	Core PCE Price Index (the Fed's preferred inflation gauge)	US
PERSONAL_SPENDING	Personal Spending (PCE)	US
INITIAL_JOBLESS_CLAIMS	Initial Jobless Claims (weekly)	US
AVERAGE_EARNINGS_GROWTH	Average Earnings Growth	GB

Example input:

{
  "countries": ["US", "GB"],
  "dateFrom": "2020-01-01",
  "dateTo": "2026-12-31",
  "categories": ["CPI", "CORE_PCE_PRICE_INDEX", "FED_FUNDS_RATE", "BOE_BANK_RATE"]
}

Output

Each dataset item is one economic event:

{
  "country": "US",
  "continent": "North America",
  "category": "NFP",
  "eventName": "Non-Farm Payrolls",
  "impactStars": 3,
  "releaseDateTime": "2024-02-02T13:30:00+00:00",
  "actualValue": 157032.0,
  "actualValueDisplay": "157M",
  "forecastValue": null,
  "previousValue": 216000.0,
  "previousValueDisplay": "216M",
  "firstPrintValue": 156933.0,
  "firstPrintValueDisplay": "157M",
  "unit": "Thousands of Persons",
  "frequency": "Monthly",
  "sourceName": "FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)",
  "sourceUrl": "https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/50"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data fields

Field	Description
country	ISO country code (US, GB)
continent	Continent, derived from country
category	Normalized indicator code
eventName	Human-readable event name
impactStars	Editorial market-impact rating, 1 (low) to 3 (high) — see methodology below
releaseDateTime	Official publication date/time, converted to UTC (ISO 8601) from the real local release time (e.g. 08:30 America/New_York for most US releases, 07:00 Europe/London for ONS)
actualValue / actualValueDisplay	Latest (most revised) published value — raw number, and a compact human-readable string (e.g. "215k", "28.7T") for display. See methodology below.
forecastValue	Market consensus estimate. Always null for now — no free official source publishes this; reserved for a future paid data source
previousValue / previousValueDisplay	The value of this same indicator's immediately preceding release (same reference-period cadence), raw and compact
firstPrintValue / firstPrintValueDisplay	The value as originally published on the release date, before later revisions — US/FRED only for now. null where not available (UK, or rate-decision events where there's no revision)
unit	Unit of the value (percent, index, thousands of persons...)
frequency	How often this indicator is published
sourceName / sourceUrl	Traceability back to the original FRED/ONS/Bank of England release or series

Pricing / Cost estimation

Runs are lightweight (structured API calls, no browser), so even multi-year, multi-country, multi-indicator requests complete in seconds. Check the Pricing tab for exact rates. A free tier is available for new Apify accounts to try the Actor.

Tips / advanced options

• Combine a narrow categories selection with a scheduled run to build a near real-time alert pipeline for a specific indicator.
• FED_FUNDS_RATE and BOE_BANK_RATE events represent actual rate decision dates (detected from the daily target-rate series), not every daily interest-rate bulletin — you get one event per real policy change, not noise.
• Some US indicators occasionally show two close release dates in the same month (e.g. an annual benchmark revision published shortly after the regular release) — this reflects FRED's own official release calendar, not a duplicate.
• UK indicators (CPI, UNEMPLOYMENT_RATE, GDP, RETAIL_SALES, INDUSTRIAL_PRODUCTION, AVERAGE_EARNINGS_GROWTH) use each ONS observation's own recorded date, since ONS does not expose a separate announcement-date calendar the way FRED does — dates are correct but reflect the reference period rather than a distinct bulletin date.
• INITIAL_JOBLESS_CLAIMS is the only weekly indicator; its releaseDateTime is the actual Thursday announcement date, matched to the correct reference week's value.
• firstPrintValue (US indicators only, release_calendar strategy) uses FRED's free ALFRED vintage data to show the value exactly as it was first published, before any later revisions — useful for backtesting what the market actually reacted to, since actualValue reflects today's fully revised figure. Not available for UK indicators or for FED_FUNDS_RATE/BOE_BANK_RATE (rate decisions aren't revised).
• *Display fields (actualValueDisplay, previousValueDisplay, firstPrintValueDisplay) are compact, human-readable strings ("215k", "700B", "28.7T") — the raw number is unit-aware first (e.g. a "Millions of Dollars" value is scaled to real dollars before picking k/M/B/T, so a $700B retail sales figure reads as "700B", never a misleading "700k"). Percent and Index units are never compacted, just cleanly trimmed (5.25, not 5.250000). Always use the plain numeric field (actualValue, etc.) for calculations — the Display fields are for presentation only.
• previousValue is this indicator's prior release, computed from the same underlying series — not a separate API call, so it's always in sync with actualValue.
• impactStars is a static editorial classification (1-3), similar to what ForexFactory/Investing.com show — it is not published by FRED/ONS/BoE. NFP, CPI, GDP, Core PCE, and central bank rate decisions are rated 3 (high); PPI, Retail Sales, Industrial Production, Jobless Claims, and earnings/sentiment indicators are 2 (medium); the remainder are 1 (low).

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Is there a free economic calendar API? Yes — this Actor wraps the free FRED, ONS, and Bank of England APIs, so there's no third-party API key to register and Apify's free tier covers light usage.

How do I get economic calendar data via API? Set countries, dateFrom/dateTo, and optionally categories as input (see above), run the Actor, and read the results from the Dataset via the Apify API, webhook, or a scheduled export to JSON/CSV.

Does this include CPI, NFP, GDP, and interest rate decisions? Yes, along with 14 other indicators across the US and UK — see the full categories table above.

This Actor only uses free, public official APIs: the FRED API (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), the ONS API (UK Office for National Statistics), and the Bank of England Statistical Database — all explicitly designed for reuse, including commercial use. Every value (actualValue, previousValue, firstPrintValue) reflects real published government/central bank statistics. impactStars is our own editorial classification (see above), and forecastValue is reserved but always null, since market consensus forecasts aren't published as objective facts by any official source. Coverage currently spans the United States and United Kingdom — Eurozone and France are planned next. If you have suggestions, run into an issue, or want a custom extension (more indicators, more countries, alerting, or a forecast/consensus data source), open an issue in the Actor's Issues tab.