fred: Fetch Data Series from FRED

In eFRED: Fetch Data from the Federal Reserve Economic Database

Fetch Data Series from FRED

Description

Function that fetches economic data from the FRED based on the series ids.

Usage

fred(
  ...,
  key = NULL,
  all = TRUE,
  info = TRUE,
  realtime_start = NULL,
  realtime_end = NULL,
  long = FALSE
)

Arguments

...	character vectors of series ids to search. Any names will be used to label the series in the resulting data.frame
key	32 character lower-cased alpha-numeric character string. If NULL, the key registered with set_fred_key is used.
all	logical; should all observations be used? Defaults to TRUE. If FALSE, only observations existing in all series will be kept.
info	logical; should information about each series, such as units and title, be kept? If so, the information will be stored in a data.frame under the attribute "info".
realtime_start, realtime_end	character date strings of format "YYY-MM-DD" used obtain information that was known during the specified time period. If empty, the latest update of the information is used.
long	logical; should the resulting data.frame be long or wide? Defaults to FALSE so that a new column is created for each series

Details

The fred function search for series ids from the FRED and returns the values in a data.frame. Unless long=TRUE, a new column will be created for each series. The dates for each observation will be included in the "date" column and will be of class "Date". Each series will be a numeric value.

An API key is required. Request a free key at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html and register it for the session with set_fred_key, or pass it through key.

If a series id cannot be found, then it will be skipped and R will issue a warning. If the FRED API itself cannot be reached, or returns a response that cannot be parsed, an informative message is printed and no data are returned. In either case the remaining series are still returned; if no series at all could be retrieved, the function returns NULL.

To access ALFRED, or the archived Federal Reserve Economic Data, use the realtime_start and realtime_end arguments to specify a time frame. More details about real time periods can be found at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/fred/realtime_period.html.

Value

data.frame

Examples

## Not run: 
api_key <- "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456"

# Naive Phillips Curve Estimation
df <- fred(p = "CPIAUCSL", u = "u6rate", key=api_key)
head(df)

df$pi  <- log(df$p) - log(c(NA, df$p[2:nrow(df)]))
reg_pc <- lm(pi ~ u, data = df)
summary(reg_pc)

# Different variations of the CPI
cpis <- c("CPIMEDSL", "CPIFABSL", "CPIHOSSL")
names(cpis) <- c("P_Med", "P_Food", "P_House")

df_cpi <- fred(cpis, key=api_key, long=TRUE)
head(df)

## End(Not run)

eFRED documentation built on Oct. 22, 2026, 5:23 p.m.