FRED Economic Data Scraper

Free-plan limit: Apify free-plan users receive at most 5 delivered records per run. Paid users may use the Actor’s configured result limit.

Scrape official Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) series into analysis-ready observation rows without requiring users to supply a FRED API key.

The Actor reads public series metadata from fred.stlouisfed.org/series/{ID} and observations from FRED's own graph CSV export. It is designed for economists, analysts, researchers, dashboards, AI agents, and scheduled data pipelines that already know the FRED series IDs they need.

What it extracts

Each dataset item represents one dated observation and repeats the series context needed to understand it independently.

Field	Meaning
seriesId	Canonical FRED series ID, such as GDP or UNRATE
title	Human-readable series name
observationDate	Date attached to the observation
value	Numeric value, or null when a requested missing value is retained
rawValue	Original FRED CSV value text
units	Units shown by FRED
seasonalAdjustment	Seasonal-adjustment qualifier, when available
frequency	Daily, monthly, quarterly, annual, or another FRED frequency
source / release	Originating institution and named release
notes	FRED's explanatory series notes
lastUpdated	Update timestamp shown on the series page
observationStart / observationEnd	Full series coverage shown by FRED
sourceUrl / csvUrl	Official provenance URLs
scrapedAt	UTC collection timestamp

When to use it

Use this Actor when you know one or more FRED series IDs and want keyless, structured observations for spreadsheets, BI tools, research notebooks, monitoring jobs, or agent workflows. Common examples include GDP, CPIAUCSL, UNRATE, FEDFUNDS, and DGS10.

This Actor does not search FRED by keyword, retrieve ALFRED vintage revisions, or expose the full authenticated FRED API. Use FRED's documented API with your own key when you need category search, releases in bulk, vintage dates, transformations, or other API-only capabilities.

Input

Input	Default	Description
seriesIds	GDP, CPIAUCSL, UNRATE	1-50 exact FRED series IDs
startDate	2020-01-01	Earliest observation date, YYYY-MM-DD
endDate	latest	Optional last observation date
maxResults	1000	Total dataset-item cap across series
maxObservationsPerSeries	1000	Per-series cap
sortOrder	ascending	ascending or descending within each series
includeMissingValues	false	Keep FRED . gaps as value: null

Example input:

{
  "seriesIds": ["GDP", "CPIAUCSL", "UNRATE"],
  "startDate": "2024-01-01",
  "endDate": "2025-12-31",
  "maxResults": 500,
  "maxObservationsPerSeries": 250,
  "sortOrder": "descending",
  "includeMissingValues": false
}

Run it through the Apify API after setting APIFY_TOKEN in your shell:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~fred-economic-data-scraper/runs" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${APIFY_TOKEN}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"seriesIds":["GDP","UNRATE"],"startDate":"2024-01-01","maxResults":100}'

Output example

{
  "seriesId": "GDP",
  "title": "Gross Domestic Product",
  "observationDate": "2025-10-01",
  "value": 31422.526,
  "rawValue": "31422.526",
  "units": "Billions of Dollars",
  "seasonalAdjustment": "Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate",
  "frequency": "Quarterly",
  "source": "U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis",
  "release": "Gross Domestic Product",
  "notes": "Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of goods and services produced in the United States.",
  "lastUpdated": "Aug 26, 2026 7:49 AM CDT",
  "observationStart": "1947-01-01",
  "observationEnd": "2026-04-01",
  "sourceUrl": "https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP",
  "csvUrl": "https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.csv?id=GDP&cosd=2024-01-01&coed=2025-12-31",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-28T10:00:00.000Z"
}

The OUTPUT and SUMMARY key-value-store records contain per-series outcomes, warnings, truncation flags, result counts, and expected PPE event counts. Invalid IDs never create fabricated observation rows.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. These are the current Apify Store event prices:

Event	Price (USD)	When it is charged
apify-default-dataset-item	FREE: $0.00669; BRONZE: $0.00669; SILVER: $0.00669; GOLD: $0.00439; PLATINUM: $0.00439; DIAMOND: $0.00439	FRED observation — One normalized, schema-valid FRED economic observation written to the default dataset.
apify-actor-start	$0.005	Actor Start — Charged when the Actor starts running. Number of events charged depends on Actor memory (one event per GB, minimum one event). — Charged once per run.

Apify platform usage for this Actor run is included alongside the event prices above; no separate per-run platform-usage fee is passed to users.

This covers Apify platform usage for this Actor run. Other Apify products or usage outside this Actor run may still follow your account plan.

Reliability and limits

Requests use bounded timeouts, three attempts for transient failures, and direct official FRED pages only. Series are fetched concurrently but written in the same order as seriesIds; observations remain stable within each series. A missing series, access block, malformed response, or partial failure is recorded in OUTPUT instead of becoming a fake dataset record. Valid results from other series are preserved.

The Actor accepts at most 50 series, 10,000 total observations, and 5,000 observations per series. Defaults are deliberately small enough for automated testing and routine scheduled runs. FRED can revise economic data, so repeated runs may legitimately return different values or update timestamps.

Legal and data use

FRED is a service of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Review the source, release, copyright, citation, and usage notes attached to each series before redistributing data. This Actor is independent and is not endorsed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It accesses only public pages and exports, does not bypass authentication or access controls, and does not collect personal data.

For problems, include the run ID, non-secret input, affected series IDs, and the OUTPUT record in your Apify support message.