US Economic Calendar – BLS, BEA & Fed Official Release Dates

Get the US macro release calendar straight from the agencies that publish the data: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI, Employment Situation/NFP, PPI, JOLTS, import prices…), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP, Personal Income & Outlays/PCE, trade…) and the Federal Reserve Board (FOMC meetings and statistical releases such as G.17, G.19, H.4.1, H.6, H.8). Every row has the date and time in Eastern Time, the agency, the release name, the reference period, a link to the official release page and, for headline releases, the actual and prior values from official data.

No ForexFactory, Investing.com or other commercial calendar is used. All schedules are US federal government works and in the public domain.

How it works

1. Downloads the official schedules: the BLS release calendar (bls.gov/schedule/news_release/bls.ics), the BEA release calendar (bea.gov ICS feed), the Federal Reserve statistical release calendar (federalreserve.gov/data/releaseschedule.htm) and the FOMC meeting calendar (federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm).
2. Converts every time to ET with the correct daylight-saving offset (BEA publishes UTC; the Fed publishes "8:30 a.m." text).
3. Filters to your date range and keywords, removes duplicates and sorts the rows chronologically.
4. Optionally adds actual and prior values:
   • BLS public API (no key needed): nonfarm payrolls change, unemployment rate, CPI and core CPI m/m, PPI final demand m/m, JOLTS openings and import prices m/m.
   • FRED (optional, off by default): BEA GDP, PCE and core PCE, the trade balance, Fed industrial production (G.17) and consumer credit (G.19). This runs only when a FRED key is supplied in the fredApiKey input (stored as a secret) or, as a fallback, the FRED_API_KEY environment variable. Only an allow-list of series whose original source is a US federal agency is requested, and any series whose FRED notes carry a copyright notice is refused. Third-party copyrighted series (for example S&P, ICE BofA, Moody's or Wilshire) are never fetched.

Requests declare a User-Agent (us-econ-calendar/0.1 (Apify actor; +https://apify.com; contact: <your email>)) and retry 429 and 5xx responses with backoff. Each run makes only about 5–15 HTTP requests.

Input example

{ "startDate": "today", "endDate": "+30d", "sources": ["BLS", "BEA", "FED_STAT", "FOMC"], "keywords": [], "includeValues": true, "maxItems": 500 }

Use keywords (for example ["cpi", "employment situation", "fomc", "gdp"]) to get only market-moving releases. The daily Fed releases (H.15, H.10, Commercial Paper) are excluded unless you turn on includeDailyFedReleases.

Output example

{
  "dateEt": "2026-10-02", "timeEt": "08:30", "dateTimeEt": "2026-10-02T08:30:00-04:00", "dateTimeUtc": "2026-10-02T12:30:00.000Z",
  "agency": "BLS", "source": "BLS", "releaseName": "Employment Situation", "period": "2026-09",
  "link": "https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm", "isPast": true, "isApproximateDate": false,
  "actual": 29, "prior": 133, "unit": "thousands",
  "values": [
    { "seriesId": "CES0000000001", "label": "Nonfarm payrolls, change", "unit": "thousands", "provider": "BLS", "period": "2026-09", "actual": 29, "prior": 133 },
    { "seriesId": "LNS14000000", "label": "Unemployment rate", "unit": "%", "provider": "BLS", "period": "2026-09", "actual": 4.4, "prior": 4.3 }
  ],
  "scheduleUrl": "https://www.bls.gov/schedule/news_release/", "attribution": "U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (public domain)"
}

Values above are illustrative. prior is the latest official (revised) value for the previous period. It is not the first print.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.009 per release row (release-row) plus the standard Apify actor-start fee. A typical month of releases (about 35 rows without the daily Fed series) costs about $0.32. The run stops cleanly when it reaches the max cost per run you set.

Integrations (Zapier / Make)

Schedule the actor in Apify Console (for example every Monday at 06:00 ET with endDate: "+7d"). Then use Apify's Zapier or Make integration, or a webhook on "run succeeded", to push the week's releases to Google Calendar, Slack, Notion or Google Sheets. The dataset is also available as CSV, XLSX or JSON from the API.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? Only from official US government sources: BLS, BEA and the Federal Reserve Board websites and the BLS public API. FRED is used only if you supply your own key.

Does it use ForexFactory, Investing.com or other commercial calendars? No. That also means there are no consensus forecasts, because forecasts are proprietary.

Why are some actual/prior values null? Values are mapped for headline series only. actual is always null for future releases (rows with isPast: false): the number does not exist until the agency publishes it at the scheduled time, so only prior (the latest published value) is filled in. Re-run after the release time to get actual. BEA and Fed values need a FRED key (fredApiKey input or FRED_API_KEY).

Which time zone is used? US Eastern (America/New_York), with the correct EST/EDT offset in dateTimeEt. The UTC time is in dateTimeUtc.

How far ahead can I see? As far as the agencies publish. BLS and the Fed usually publish through the end of the next year, BEA a few months ahead, and the FOMC through the next year.

Do I need an API key? No. The BLS API key (free) only raises the daily limits. The FRED key is optional; pass it in the secret fredApiKey input (or set the FRED_API_KEY environment variable).

Are dates ever approximate? Yes. When the Fed marks a date as approximate (for example G.20), isApproximateDate is true. Agencies also reschedule releases, for example during government shutdowns, so run the actor again before you rely on a date.

What permissions does it need? It runs with limited permissions and only writes to its own default dataset and key-value store.

Licence & attribution

BLS, BEA and Federal Reserve Board schedules and data are US government works in the public domain. Cite the agency. When FRED values are included: "Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis". This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Your use of FRED is subject to the FRED API Terms of Use (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/terms_of_use.html).

Disclaimer

This actor is not affiliated with BLS, BEA, the Federal Reserve or the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Schedules can change, so always check critical dates on the linked official page. This is not investment advice.

Running locally

npm ci
npm test            # unit tests (mocked HTTP)
npm run test:live   # live checks against bls.gov, bea.gov, federalreserve.gov, api.bls.gov
npm start           # uses storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
FRED_API_KEY=... npm start   # optional FRED enrichment