Bls MCP server

BLS — Bureau of Labor Statistics

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics's data warehouse. Employment, unemployment, wages, prices (CPI/PPI), productivity, occupational projections — the official US labor and price data. National, state, and metro level. Free with a registered API key.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

Anything labor-market or inflation-related at the official level: BLS. Where FRED gives you headline series, BLS gives you the underlying detail (occupation-level, industry-level, MSA-level). Agents researching local economic conditions, sector wages, or specific CPI components reach BLS directly.

Three core flows:

1. Look up a series. "What's the metro Denver unemployment rate?" → blssearch({query: "Denver unemployment"}) → series IDs. Then blsgetseries({seriesid}) for values.

2. Latest value. "What's national unemployment right now?" → blslatest({seriesid: "LNS14000000"}) → most recent observation.

3. Browse popular series. "What does BLS publish?" → blspopularseries → curated list of high-traffic IDs.

4. Local-area unemployment by place name. "What's the unemployment rate in Wake County, NC?" or "Cary, North Carolina" or "Fargo-Moorhead MSA" → blslocalunemployment({place, state?}). This is the tool for LAUS (Local Area Unemployment Statistics) lookups by county / metro area / city — blssearch's curated catalog has no local-area entries, and constructing a LAUS series ID by hand requires a place → BLS area-code crosswalk (~8,000 US counties/metros/cities) that isn't something to guess at. blslocal_unemployment resolves the name against that crosswalk itself (bundled from BLS's la.area reference file), returns candidates when the name is ambiguous, and falls back to the county — saying so explicitly — when a city is below the LAUS city-reporting threshold.

Reading the response

blsgetseries returns each series newest first — the payload says so in observation_order, so you don't have to infer the direction from the dates. count is the number of points for that series, and BLS returns every point in the requested year range, so it is never a total sitting beside a shorter list.

Auth

BLS API requires a free key from https://www.bls.gov/developers/. Without it, calls are throttled to ~25/day per IP. With a key, it's 500/day. Pass via _apiKey per call.

Series ID structure

BLS series IDs encode survey, area, sector, and data type. Examples:

Don't try to construct national/state/industry IDs from scratch — use blssearch or blspopularseries. For LAUS local-area IDs (county/MSA/city) specifically, use blslocal_unemployment({place, state?}) — it resolves the place name to the correct area code for you.

Update cadence

Pipeworx caches BLS responses with TTLs aligned to release schedules.

Common pitfalls

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.