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stefanoamorelliMCP SERVER

Federal Reserve Economic Data

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

by stefanoamorelli ↗Economic, Alternative & Prediction-Market DataCommunity

LABSCO 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

See installation options