UK Economic Calendar — ONS Release Dates & Postponements

Official source. No API key. Pay per record.

This actor gives you the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) release calendar as structured records, read from the ONS's own public search API. Every release the ONS has announced is here: what is coming out, when, whether the date is confirmed or still provisional, whether it has been postponed, and — for every date change — the ONS's own change notice and the previous date. Published and cancelled releases are included too, back to 2016.

On 27 September 2026 the calendar held 9,818 releases: 404 upcoming (284 with a confirmed date, 120 provisional), 9,092 published and 322 cancelled. The forward calendar ran to February 2028 — Consumer price inflation, for example, was already dated monthly through January 2028.

Use it three ways:

• Forward calendar. nextDays: 14 returns every ONS release due in the next two weeks, soonest first (26 releases on 27 September 2026, including GDP quarterly national accounts and the Balance of payments on 30 September).
• Postponement watch. onlyDateChanges: true returns only releases whose date the ONS has moved, with the reason in the ONS's words. On 27 September 2026, 59 releases dated from 27 September 2025 onward carried at least one date change.
• Release history. Published releases by date range or topic, for back-testing, archives and "what did the ONS publish when" questions.

Who buys this and for what job

• Macro traders, economists and research desks who need UK data release times (CPI, GDP, labour market, retail sales, public finances) in their own calendar or trading system, from the source rather than a re-keyed third-party calendar.
• Financial news, data and newsletter teams building "the week ahead" pieces and alerts.
• Fintech and market-data products that show an economic calendar to their users and want the UK part straight from the ONS.
• Public-affairs, policy and consultancy teams tracking when the statistics they care about will land — and when they slip.
• Data teams keeping a clean, deduplicated release table keyed on the ONS's own release URI.

Sample output

{
  "record_id": "ONS:/releases/physicalenergyflowaccountspefa2026",
  "release_uri": "/releases/physicalenergyflowaccountspefa2026",
  "release_url": "https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/physicalenergyflowaccountspefa2026",
  "calendar_status": "upcoming",
  "title": "Physical energy flow accounts (PEFA) 2026",
  "summary": "Physical energy flow accounts (PEFA) record the flows of energy from the environment to the economy, within the economy, and from the economy back to the environment.",
  "release_date": "2026-09-28T08:30:00.000Z",
  "provisional_date": null,
  "published": false,
  "cancelled": false,
  "finalised": true,
  "postponed": true,
  "census": false,
  "date_change_count": 1,
  "date_changes": [
    {
      "change_notice": "We are postponing the Physical energy flow accounts (PEFA) 2026 release, due to be published on 18 September. This is because of a late resupply of data from our data supplier following queries raised during our quality assurance processes. This release will now be published on 28 September.",
      "previous_date": "2026-09-18T08:30:00.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "source": "Office for National Statistics — release calendar, read from the ONS public search API (https://api.beta.ons.gov.uk/v1/search/releases)",
  "licence": "Open Government Licence v3.0 — the ONS states that its statistics and content are published under the Open Government Licence (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/).",
  "attribution": "Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0; reformatted by NexGen Signal.",
  "observed_at": "2026-09-27T16:21:27Z"
}

Pricing

Apify plan	Price per record
Free	$0.05
Bronze	$0.045
Silver	$0.04
Gold and above	$0.0335

You pay only for records delivered to your dataset. maxRecords caps what a run can cost: 500 records cost $25 on the Free plan. Filtering is free — the actor reads the calendar and you pay only for what matches.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
releaseTypes	Which parts of the calendar: upcoming, published, cancelled	upcoming and published
nextDays	Only releases dated from today to N days ahead	not set
lastDays	Only releases dated in the last N days (and any later)	not set
fromDate, toDate	Only releases dated between two days (YYYY-MM-DD, UTC)	not set
query	Words passed to the ONS search, e.g. inflation, GDP, labour market	none
titleContains	Keep only titles containing this exact phrase (not case-sensitive), e.g. Consumer price inflation	none
onlyDateChanges	Only releases the ONS has re-dated, with its change notices	off
excludeCensus	Drop releases the ONS flags as Census releases	off
sortBy	calendar (upcoming soonest first, then published newest first, then cancelled), newest or oldest	calendar
maxRecords	Maximum records delivered and billed	10

Default changed on 30 Sep 2026: if you leave maxRecords out, a run now returns up to 10 records (it was 500). Set maxRecords yourself to get more — the maximum is unchanged.

Example — the UK data week ahead:

{"nextDays": 7, "releaseTypes": ["upcoming"], "maxRecords": 200}

Example — every CPI release date, past and future:

{"query": "inflation", "titleContains": "consumer price inflation", "releaseTypes": ["published", "upcoming"], "sortBy": "newest", "maxRecords": 500}

(On 27 September 2026 the first rows of that run were the ONS's scheduled CPI releases for December 2027 down to July 2027.)

Output

Field	Meaning
record_id	ONS:<release uri> — unique per release
release_uri, release_url	The ONS's release path and the release page on www.ons.gov.uk
calendar_status	upcoming, published or cancelled — the ONS calendar list the release came from
title, summary	As the ONS publishes them
release_date	Release date and time, UTC (ISO 8601) — e.g. 07:00 UK time in summer is 06:00:00.000Z
provisional_date	For provisional releases, the ONS's wording, e.g. October 2026
published, cancelled, finalised, postponed, census	The ONS's own flags; finalised: false means the date is still provisional
date_change_count, date_changes	Every date change the ONS has recorded: change_notice (its explanation) and previous_date
source, licence, attribution, observed_at	Provenance on every record

Values are the ONS's as published. Nothing is renamed, re-timed or estimated; the actor does not convert times to UK local time.

Cost guidance

The forward calendar is about 400 releases in total, so a full forward pull costs about $13 on Gold ($20 on Free). A "next 14 days" run on 27 September 2026 returned 26 records (under $1 on Gold). The postponement watch over a year's window was 59 records. The full history of about 9,800 releases is about $330 on Gold, once; after that a daily or weekly nextDays or lastDays run keeps you current for a few dollars a month.

How a run works

The actor checks robots.txt on the API host (api.beta.ons.gov.uk serves none — HTTP 404 — which is recorded in the run receipt as "no policy", not as permission), then asks the ONS search API for each release type. Large date ranges are split into windows small enough to come back in one response each, because offset paging on this API is not stable: in testing, paging through the published list by offset returned 9,091 of 9,092 releases on some runs. With single-response windows every test run returned all 9,092, and each run's receipt compares what came back with the total the ONS reports for each type. Matching records are pushed to your dataset first and charged only after they are delivered; if you set a maximum charge, the run stops cleanly when it is reached. Test runs took 4–35 seconds. If the ONS API cannot be reached after several retries, the run ends with a clear message and nothing is charged.

Honest limitations

• UK releases only, ONS only. This is the ONS's own calendar. Releases by other UK producers (HM Treasury, the Bank of England, HMRC and other departments) that appear on the wider GOV.UK research and statistics calendar are not in it.
• No figures. The calendar says what is released and when — not the numbers, forecasts or "actual vs consensus" that trading calendars show.
• History starts in 2016. The ONS calendar API holds published releases from February 2016.
• Dates are UTC. The ONS publishes times in UTC; a 07:00 UK release in summer appears as 06:00Z.
• Provisional dates can be vague. On 27 September 2026, 120 upcoming releases were not yet finalised (finalised: false). Many carry the ONS's provisional wording in provisional_date — a month such as "October 2026", or sometimes a day — but not all do, so use finalised to tell confirmed dates from provisional ones.
• Search words are the ONS's search. query uses the ONS's own matching, which is broad; titleContains keeps only titles containing your exact phrase (not case-sensitive).
• The API host is labelled beta. The ONS has served its calendar from api.beta.ons.gov.uk for years; if it moves, the run reports it rather than failing silently.

Licence and attribution

The ONS states that its statistics and content are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Every record carries the ONS's attribution form: Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0; reformatted by NexGen Signal. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Office for National Statistics.

Differentiation

Economic-calendar actors on the Store — such as scrapemint/forexfactory-economic-calendar, pintostudio/economic-calendar-data-investing-com, gochujang/economic-calendar-tracker and solidcode/economic-calendar-data-scraper — read third-party sites (ForexFactory, Investing.com) that list a selection of headline events. This actor reads the statistics producer itself: every ONS release rather than a headline selection, confirmed versus provisional status, the ONS's own postponement notices with previous dates, and cancelled releases, all under an open government licence you can redistribute with attribution.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of NexGen Signal — official-source data products, no API keys, pay per record. Related actors for the numbers behind the releases:

• UK GDP Four-Decimal Time Series - ONS
• UK CPIH Inflation Time Series - ONS
• UK Labour Market Time Series - ONS
• UK Retail Sales Index Monthly - ONS
• UK Construction Output Monthly - ONS