FRED Economic Data MCP server

FRED MCP Server 📊

U.S. and global economic data for Claude Desktop and any MCP-compatible client, powered by FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data). Search and pull from 800,000+ economic time series — GDP, inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and more — all from natural language.

npm package: fred-economic-mcp  ·  GitHub repo: danishashko/fred-economic-mcp.

🎯 What You Get

• 🔎 Search 800k+ economic series by keyword
• 📈 Observations with built-in transforms (levels, % change, year-over-year) and frequency aggregation (daily → monthly/quarterly/annual)
• 🧾 Series metadata — units, frequency, seasonal adjustment, coverage, notes
• 🇺🇸 Economic snapshot — key U.S. indicators in one call
• 🗂️ Category browsing to discover data by topic
• 🗓️ Releases tracked by FRED

Every tool returns human-readable markdown by default, or structured JSON on request (response_format: "json"). The server is lightweight (Python standard library + mcp only), applies FRED's transformations server-side so the AI gets clean numbers, and retries automatically when FRED rate-limits.

🔑 Get a Free API Key (required)

FRED requires a free API key. It takes about a minute:

1. Create an account at fredaccount.stlouisfed.org and request a key at fredaccount.stlouisfed.org/apikeys.
2. Provide it to the server via the FREDAPIKEY environment variable (see config below).

🚀 Quick Start

Add this to your Claude Desktop config and restart Claude:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claudedesktopconfig.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claudedesktopconfig.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fred": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "fred-economic-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FRED_API_KEY": "your_free_fred_api_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

On first launch the npx wrapper creates an isolated Python environment and installs the dependencies for you (a one-time step that can take a minute). You only need Python 3.10+ and Node.js 16+ on your machine.

Prefer a global install?

npm install -g fred-economic-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fred": {
      "command": "fred-economic-mcp",
      "env": { "FRED_API_KEY": "your_free_fred_api_key_here" }
    }
  }
}

🔧 Available Tools

Every tool also accepts response_format ("markdown", the default, or "json").

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.