fredr

fredr provides a complete set of R bindings to the Federal Reserve of Economic Data (FRED) RESTful API, provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The functions allow the user to search for and fetch time series observations as well as associated metadata within the FRED database.

The core function in this package is fredr(), which fetches observations for a FRED series. That said, there are many other FRED endpoints exposed through fredr, such as fredr_series_search_text(), which allows you to search for a FRED series by text.

We strongly encourage referencing the FRED API documentation to leverage the full power of fredr.

You’ll also need a free API key to use fredr. See ?fredr_set_key().

Installation

You can download fredr from CRAN with:

To get the development version of the package:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("sboysel/fredr")

Example

You can use fredr() to fetch series from FRED. This fetches the US unemployment rate series from 1990-2000.

library(fredr)

fredr(
  series_id = "UNRATE",
  observation_start = as.Date("1990-01-01"),
  observation_end = as.Date("2000-01-01")
)
#> # A tibble: 121 x 5
#>    date       series_id value realtime_start realtime_end
#>    <date>     <chr>     <dbl> <date>         <date>      
#>  1 1990-01-01 UNRATE      5.4 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  2 1990-02-01 UNRATE      5.3 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  3 1990-03-01 UNRATE      5.2 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  4 1990-04-01 UNRATE      5.4 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  5 1990-05-01 UNRATE      5.4 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  6 1990-06-01 UNRATE      5.2 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  7 1990-07-01 UNRATE      5.5 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  8 1990-08-01 UNRATE      5.7 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#>  9 1990-09-01 UNRATE      5.9 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#> 10 1990-10-01 UNRATE      5.9 2021-01-29     2021-01-29  
#> # … with 111 more rows

Usage

See the Get started article.

Documentation

See the documentation site.

Restrictions

According to the FRED team, the following data sources do not permit redistribution through the FRED API:

  • ICE Libor Rates
  • ICE Swap Rates
  • LBMA Gold Price: Daily Prices
  • LBMA Silver Price: Daily Prices

If you need data from any of these sources, it is recommended to download the data directly from the FRED website. The series in these sources can be found here.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the fredr project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

See Also

There are several other existing R packages designed for the FRED API: