Our last FRED blog post of the year… Soon it’ll be time to change the calendar on the desk or the wall or (more likely) your phone, which requires no effort at all. But FRED never coasts or slacks off! Although there’s not much data about calendars beyond what’s in the producer price index (shown in the above graph), we definitely have something to say about our own calendar.

FRED maintains an Economic Release Calendar for each day of the year, detailing the data releases published on that date and, if known, also the time of the release. A green checkmark indicates a release has been updated in FRED.

FRED strives to make updates as soon as possible after the primary source makes the data public. Unfortunately, it’s not instantaneous, as FRED needs to doublecheck that the data are plausible and weren’t corrupted during transmission.

It’s a rare occurrence, but over the years we’ve addressed a misplaced decimal point, an unexpected change in units, and a math error, for example. Sometimes the data format or series name changes, which requires some manual labor to update that information for our users. And larger-than-average datasets require higher-than-average response time. But the norm is that the data are available in FRED within a few minutes of their release. Happy New Year!

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “calendar” to get the graph above. Scan the FRED homepage and click the “Release Calendar” link to get to our calendar.

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.