Labsco
MCP SERVER

Federal Reserve Economic Data

by stefanoamorelli ↗

Browse, search and pull any of FRED's 800,000+ economic series, with the transformations applied before the data reaches you.

Economic, Alternative & Prediction-Market Data
Summary
The transformations are the reason to use it over raw API calls.

Asking for a series is easy; asking for it as a year-over-year percent change, aggregated to quarterly, averaged rather than end-of-period, is where hand-rolled integrations start producing quietly wrong numbers. Those options are parameters here, applied by FRED itself. The rate limiting and request coalescing matter for the same unglamorous reason — one key shared across sessions stays inside quota.

What it is

An MCP server over the Federal Reserve Economic Data API that reduces the whole catalogue to three tools: one to browse it, one to search it, one to fetch a series. It is an independent open-source project, not affiliated with the Federal Reserve.

What you get
  • `fred_browse` — walk the catalogue by `categories`, `releases`, `sources`, `category_series` or `release_series`, paginated and ordered
  • `fred_search` — keyword or series-ID search with tag include and exclude lists, ordering by popularity or last update, and filters on frequency, units or seasonal adjustment
  • `fred_get_series` — observations for a series such as `GDP` or `UNRATE`, with a date range plus unit transformations (`chg`, `pch`, `pc1`, `pca`, `log` and more), frequency aggregation, and `avg`, `sum` or `eop` methods
  • Client-side rate limiting matched to FRED's per-key quota via `FRED_RATE_LIMIT_PER_MINUTE`, defaulting to 120
  • Response caching (`FRED_CACHE_TTL_MS`, default 60000) and coalescing of identical concurrent requests into a single upstream call, so several sessions share one quota
  • Streamable HTTP as well as stdio — `--http` or `TRANSPORT=http`, default port 3000 — and a `GET /healthz` endpoint reporting active sessions, cache statistics and uptime
Requirements

A FRED API key in `FRED_API_KEY`. Run the Node build (`fred-mcp-server`, version 1.2.0) or the Docker image `stefanoamorelli/fred-mcp-server:latest`. Licensed AGPL-3.0, which matters if you deploy a modified copy as a service: you owe your users the source. Retries, timeouts, session limits and log level are all environment variables with documented defaults.

Setup effort

One command plus a key — npm install -g fred-mcp-server, then supply credentials