ECB Data — Exchange Rates, Policy Rates, Inflation, Money Supply

The European Central Bank publishes about 214 statistical dataflows through its Data Portal, addressed by SDMX keys such as EXR.D.USD.EUR.SP00.A. That is the euro/dollar reference rate. Nobody remembers that, which is why this Actor carries a catalogue of the fifteen series people actually ask for and resolves the codes to words.

No API key. No registration. The ECB's own figures, queried live on every run.

What a default run returns

Picking Exchange rates and Policy rates, four currencies, last 90 observations: 728 rows in 8 seconds.

Series	Latest	Value
EXR.D.USD.EUR.SP00.A	2026-09-18	1.1460 US dollar per euro
EXR.D.GBP.EUR.SP00.A	2026-09-18	0.8588
EXR.D.JPY.EUR.SP00.A	2026-09-18	180.94
EXR.D.CHF.EUR.SP00.A	2026-09-18	0.9462
FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.DFR.LEV	2026-09-19	Deposit facility 2.50 %
FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.MRR_FR.LEV	2026-09-19	Main refinancing 2.65 %
FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.MLFR.LEV	2026-09-19	Marginal lending 2.90 %

Each row carries the decoded dimensions rather than the codes: currency: "US dollar", frequency: "Daily", unit: "US dollar", observationStatus: "Normal value", plus a dimensions object with every dimension of that dataflow spelled out — EXR_TYPE: "Spot", CURRENCY_DENOM: "Euro".

The catalogue

Every key below was queried against the live API and returns observations. None of them is transcribed from documentation.

Exchange rates — EXR, daily euro reference rates, the ones fixed at 14:15 CET. 29 currencies still published (USD, GBP, JPY, CHF, CNY, AUD, CAD, SEK, NOK, DKK, PLN, CZK, HUF, RON, TRY, BRL, INR, KRW, MXN, ZAR and nine more) plus 15 the ECB stopped quoting — BGN ended 2025-12-31 when Bulgaria adopted the euro, HRK on 2022-12-30, RUB on 2022-03-01. Available daily, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annually.

Policy rates — FM.D.U2.EUR.4F.KR.{DFR,MRR_FR,MRR_RT,MLFR}.LEV: the deposit facility, the main refinancing rate, and the marginal lending facility, as a calendar-daily step series.

€STR — EST.B.EU000A2X2A25.WT is the rate itself (2.44 % on 2026-09-17), with the number of contributing banks, the number of transactions and the total volume alongside it, and the compounded 1-week to 12-month averages and the compounded index.

Euribor — FM.{M,Q,A}.U2.EUR.RT.MM.EURIBOR{1M,3M,6M,1Y}D_.HSTA. 3-month Euribor averaged 2.513 % in August 2026. Monthly, quarterly and annual only; the ECB does not publish a daily Euribor here.

Yield curve — YC.B.U2.EUR.4F.G_N_A.SV_C_YM.SR_{3M,1Y,2Y,5Y,10Y,30Y}, the AAA-rated euro area government spot curve, plus the all-issuer curve at 2 and 10 years. On 2026-09-17 the AAA 10-year stood at 3.4875 % and the all-issuer 10-year at 3.9424 %.

Government bond yields — IRS.M.{area}.L.L40.CI.0000.EUR.N.Z, the long-term rate for convergence purposes, for 24 areas. August 2026: Germany 3.185 %, Italy 3.986 %, euro area 3.603 %.

Inflation — HICP.M.{area}.N.{item}.4D0.{ANR,INX} for 32 countries and aggregates: headline, core excluding energy and food, the index level, and a breakdown into energy, food, services, industrial goods and non-energy industrial goods. August 2026: euro area headline 3.2 %, core 2.4 %, energy 14.3 %, food 1.1 %; Germany 2.9 %, Italy 3.2 %.

Money supply — BSI.M.U2.Y.V.{M10,M20,M30,L10}.X.I.U2.2300.Z01.A for annual growth and the .X.1...E variant for outstanding amounts. July 2026: M3 grew 3.38 % to EUR 17 613 983 million, M1 3.15 %, M2 3.34 %.

Unemployment — LFSI.M.{area}.S.UNEHRT.TOTAL0.15_74.T, monthly, for 34 areas including the United States and Japan. July 2026: euro area 6.4 %, Germany 4.0 %, Italy 5.8 %, France 8.3 %, Spain 10.0 %.

GDP — MNA.Q.Y.{area}.W2.S1.S1.B.B1GQ._Z._Z._Z.{EUR,XDC}.LR.{N,G1,GY}, real chain-linked volume, its quarter-on-quarter and its year-on-year growth. 28 countries plus the euro area aggregate.

Raw keys

If you already know the key, put it in rawSeriesKeys as EXR.D.USD.EUR.SP00.A or BSI/M.U2.Y.V.M30.X.1.U2.2300.Z01.E and it is passed through untouched — including wildcards. An empty segment matches everything in that position, so EXR.D..EUR.SP00.A returns all 44 currencies at once, and EXR.D.USD+GBP+JPY.EUR.SP00.A returns three. The decoding and the summary rows work the same way on a raw key as on a catalogue one.

Empty is not broken

The Data Portal has two different empty answers and one loud failure, and telling them apart is most of the work:

HTTP 404 — no series matched the key. EXR.D.ZZZ.EUR.SP00.A is a perfectly well-formed SDMX key for a currency the ECB does not quote. This is reported as a summary row with observations: 0 and a note saying so, not as an error.

HTTP 200 with an empty body — the series exists but the window you asked for holds nothing. Asking the daily dollar rate for Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September 2026 returns exactly this: status 200, zero bytes, not even a CSV header. Reference rates are fixed on business days, so the answer is correct and the summary row says which window came back empty.

HTTP 400 — the key is malformed, nearly always the wrong number of dimensions. EXR.D.USD.EUR has three where EXR takes five. The summary row names the dataflow's actual dimensions and the count you supplied, because the portal's own reply is a generic web page with nothing useful in it.

Within a longer window, a TARGET holiday is different again: it comes back as a row with a blank value and status H. Those are counted in holidayPeriods rather than dropped without trace — 62 of them in the dollar rate's 7 158-row history.

Who uses this

Treasury and finance teams pulling the official reference rate for invoice conversion and month-end revaluation, where "official" means the ECB's own fixing rather than a broker quote. Economists and research desks building a euro area dashboard without a Bloomberg line. Fintech and accounting products that need a defensible FX source with an audit trail. Anyone who has tried to read an SDMX key and given up.

Scope and limits

The euro is always the base. Reference rates are quoted as foreign currency per one euro. A dollar/sterling cross has to be derived from the two euro legs, and the ECB says explicitly that its rates are for reference, not for transactions.

Coverage differs by series, and the run tells you which. Japan has an unemployment rate here but no HICP; euro area GDP growth and member-state GDP growth live in two different series under two different unit codes. An area a series does not carry is dropped from the request by the ECB and the summary shows which series came back.

Recent periods are provisional. Inflation, GDP and unemployment are revised. observationStatus carries the ECB's own flag — normal, provisional, estimated — on every observation.

Frequency is only sometimes a choice. Exchange rates come at five frequencies and Euribor at three. Inflation, money supply, unemployment and bond yields are monthly only, and GDP quarterly only. Asking for daily inflation is answered monthly, with a note in the summary row saying that is what happened.

Source and licence

European Central Bank, through data-api.ecb.europa.eu, the ECB Data Portal's SDMX 2.1 API. Open access, no key, no quota published. The ECB permits reuse of its statistics with attribution to the ECB as the source.

Some dataflows reached through the same endpoint are maintained by Eurostat rather than the ECB — unemployment is EUROSTAT:LFSI and GDP is ESTAT:MNA — and carry Eurostat's own reuse terms. Every row names its dataflow and dataflowTitle so the provenance travels with the data.

Frequently asked

Are these the real ECB rates? Yes. The values returned here for 2026-09-18 — USD 1.1460, JPY 180.94, GBP 0.85880, SEK 11.2915 — match the ECB's separate eurofxref-daily.xml feed on www.ecb.europa.eu exactly. Two different publication paths, the same numbers.

Why is my daily series missing days? Weekends and TARGET holidays. The ECB fixes reference rates on business days only. A window covering only a weekend legitimately returns nothing, and the summary row says so rather than leaving you guessing.

Why does the inflation figure differ from what I found in another tool? There are two consumer-price dataflows on this portal with almost the same name. ICP is the older one and its euro area headline series stops at December 2025. HICP is the live one and had August 2026 at 3.2 %. This Actor uses HICP. Any guide that tells you to query ICP.M.U2.N.000000.4.ANR is giving you a series that stopped updating.

How do I combine a date range with a count? They stack. startPeriod and endPeriod narrow first, then lastNObservations takes the most recent N inside that range. A 2015 range on the dollar rate returns 21 observations; the same range with the last 4 returns the last 4 of those.

Does the API rate-limit? Not observably. Twenty-five sequential and twenty concurrent requests all returned 200. The Actor still runs at four concurrent requests, because the portal sits behind a web application firewall that answers a malformed request with a block page, and a burst is what firewalls react to.

Can I get a series that is not in the catalogue? Yes — rawSeriesKeys takes any key on the portal, across all 214 dataflows, and the dimension decoding works on it because the structure definitions are fetched at run time rather than hard-coded.

Why is the unit on a GDP growth rate labelled "Percentage change" when the ECB says EUR? Because the ECB files growth series with the currency of the underlying level. MNA...EUR.LR.GY carries UNIT_MEASURE EUR and a value of 0.49, which is 0.49 per cent, not 0.49 euro. Where the transformation dimension says growth, the unit is corrected and unitNote records what the ECB actually filed.