📈 BLS CPI Data Scraper

🚀 Export Consumer Price Index time series in seconds. Pull official BLS CPI observations for any series, any year range, straight to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-25 · 📊 8 fields per record · National & metro coverage · 1913-present

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Consumer Price Index, the headline US inflation measure. This actor uses the official BLS public timeseries API to return monthly observations for any CPI series you specify.

Coverage includes All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), Wage Earners (CPI-W), Chained CPI, regional and metro indexes, and category-level series (food, energy, shelter, medical).

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Economists	Track inflation by category
Finance teams	Index escalators, COLA
Researchers	Long historical data pulls
Journalists	Monthly inflation reporting

📋 What the BLS CPI Data Scraper does

• Calls the BLS public API (v2) for any list of CPI series IDs
• Returns monthly observations with year, period, value, and footnotes
• Supports historical pulls back to series inception
• Flags the latest observation per series

💡 Why it matters: Official inflation data, structured for analysis.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Description
seriesIds	array	BLS series IDs (default CUUR0000SA0)
maxItems	integer	Cap on observations
startYear	integer	Optional
endYear	integer	Optional

{ "seriesIds": ["CUUR0000SA0"], "maxItems": 50 }

{ "seriesIds": ["CUUR0000SAF1", "CUUR0000SAH1"], "startYear": 2020, "endYear": 2025 }

⚠️ Good to Know: Without an API key, BLS limits queries. For heavy use, register a free key at bls.gov.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
📌 seriesId	string	BLS series ID
📅 year	number	Observation year
📆 period	string	M01-M13
periodName	string	Month name
💲 value	number	Index value
latest	boolean	True for the most recent obs
footnotes	array	BLS footnote text
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp

✨ Why choose this Actor

• Direct BLS API: official source, no scraping
• Multi-series in one run
• Returns latest flag for monitoring

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Speed	Maintenance
This actor	Pay per result	Fast	None
BLS website manual	Free	Slow	High
FRED API	Free	Fast	Custom code

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the actor
3. Set series IDs and optional year range
4. Run
5. Download dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Contract escalation

Quarterly CPI lookups for lease and supply contracts.

Treasury & finance

TIPS modelling and inflation hedging.

HR

COLA calculations for salary bands.

Macroeconomics

Sector CPI trends for category management.

🔌 Automating BLS CPI Data Scraper

Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Drive.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research

Academic time series analysis.

Personal

Household budget inflation modelling.

Non-profit

Cost-of-living advocacy.

Experimentation

Train forecasting models on CPI data.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Copilot can explain series IDs and outputs.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are CPI series IDs? A: BLS identifiers like CUUR0000SA0 (All Urban Consumers). Q: How far back? A: Series-dependent, some go back to 1913. Q: Why pull multiple series? A: Compare core vs headline or food vs energy. Q: Are values seasonally adjusted? A: Depends on the series prefix (CUUR vs CUSR). Q: How frequent are updates? A: Monthly, mid-month for the prior month. Q: Is an API key required? A: Not for small queries. Q: Can I get percent changes? A: This actor returns raw values, compute changes downstream. Q: Are regional indexes supported? A: Yes, via series ID. Q: Does this include Chained CPI? A: Yes, with C-CPI-U series IDs. Q: What is the latest flag? A: True for the most recent observation of each series.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Sheets, Webhooks.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only publicly available data collected.