Top 4 Government Sources for Free Economic & Financial Data


Finding free data can be difficult so here is a list of 4 high-quality government data sources along with a huge number of links to specific datasets and APIs that you can access for free (summarized in the table below).

Data SourceExamples of Data ProvidedAdditional Information
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)Prices

Consumer Price Index (CPI)

Producer Price Index (PPI)

Import/Export Price Indexes (MXP)

Labor Force & Employment

Current Population Survey Data (monthly data covering a wide range of labor force & employment data with demographics)

National Current Employment Statistics (CES)

State & Metro Area Employment, Hours, & Earnings Statistics

Labor Force Statistics

Quarterly Census of Employment & Wages (State & County Level) (QCEW)

Annual Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics

Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) — States, Counties, & Metropolitan Areas

Employment Situation “A” Tables Historical Data

Compensation & Cost of Employment

Employment Cost Index & Employer Costs for Employee Compensation

Employee Benefit Survey (national)

Work Stoppages (e.g. Strikes & Lockouts)

Work Stoppages involving 1000 or more workers

Workplace Injuries

Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI)

Case & Demographic Characteristics for Work-related Injuries & Illnesses Involving Days Away from Work

Workplace Injury & Illness by Industry, Work Activity & Establishment Size

Behavior

American Time Use Survey (ATUS)

Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE)

National Longitudinal Surveys
The BLS lists additional information (including raw data, explanations of data indexes, news releases, various data query methods, & more) on this page.


The BLS also provides two data APIs that can be used to access most BLS data, including the retrieval of historical timeseries in JSON data-interchange or XLSX format
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)S&P 500 (10-year history of daily close)

M2 money supply

GDP (since 1947)

10-Year Treasury Market Yield (since 1962)

Unemployment Rate (since 1948)

U.S. Dollar-U.K. Pound Sterling Spot Exchange Rate (daily data since 1971)
FRED is a database of economic data which has over 816,000 US and international time series.

FRED also has an API available.

NOTE: It is important to note that FRED doesn’t necessarily make any attempt to adjust data to compensate for changing standards. For example, the Consumer Credit Data seems to suggest that consumers doubled their debt in March 2010, but the actual reason for the sudden jump was a significant change in reporting standards.
Federal Reserve (other than FRED)Consumer Credit Historical Data

Charge-Off & Delinquency Rates on Loans and Leases at Commercial Banks
The Federal Reserve has this data page linking to many of the data sources they maintain.
U.S. Government Data PortalOpenFDA APIs

National Farmer’s Market Directory

Northeast Ocean Commercial Fishing Data
The U.S. government data portal has over 337,000 datasets available to the public on a huge variety of subjects (although the site is not the best designed and can sometimes be frustrating to use).

Ricky Nave

In college, Ricky studied physics & math, won a prestigious research competition hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, started several small businesses including an energy chewing gum business and a computer repair business, and graduated with a thesis in algebraic topology. After graduating, Ricky attended grad school at Duke University in the mathematics PhD program where he worked on quantum algorithms & non-Euclidean geometry models for flexible proteins. He also worked in cybersecurity at Los Alamos during this time before eventually dropping out of grad school to join a startup working on formal semantic modeling for legal documents. Finally, he left that startup to start his own in the finance & crypto space. Now, he helps entrepreneurs pay less capital gains tax.

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