Economic calendar

What an economic calendar is

An economic calendar is the schedule of when official economic data and central-bank decisions are published, laid out in advance so you can see what is coming before it arrives. Markets do not move at random. They move, in large part, on a handful of scheduled numbers: how fast prices are rising, how many people found work, whether the economy grew, and what the central bank decided to do about interest rates. Those numbers land at times that are known weeks ahead. The calendar is the list of those times.

The value is in the word scheduled. A company can surprise you with earnings any morning, but the inflation print for a given month is released on a date the statistics agency published months earlier, at a fixed hour. That means you can plan around it. You can be flat before a release you have no edge on, size down into a rate decision, or simply know why the market you trade suddenly moved at 8:30 in the morning when nothing else happened. The traders who get hurt by data are usually the ones who did not know it was due.

This calendar covers the releases that actually move global markets rather than every minor national statistic. From the United States: CPI, the jobs report, PPI, GDP, PCE inflation, retail sales, industrial production, housing, weekly jobless claims and the FOMC rate decision. From the euro area: the ECB's rate decisions and Eurostat's flash inflation, GDP, unemployment, producer prices, retail trade and sentiment. From the United Kingdom: the Bank of England's Bank Rate decisions. From Spain, Canada and Australia: the headline national releases. And the rate decisions of every major central bank sit alongside the Fed and the ECB, the Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of Australia and of New Zealand, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan. More countries are being added, and every event is tagged with the country it belongs to so you can filter to the markets you care about.

Each entry tells you three things at a glance: the date and time in your own timezone, how much the release typically moves markets, shown as a high, medium or low impact tier, and a plain-language read of which way a surprise usually pushes prices. That last part is the piece most calendars leave out, and it is the one that turns a list of dates into something you can plan against.

How to read a release without a forecast number

Most economic calendars show you three figures next to each event: the previous reading, a consensus forecast, and once it lands, the actual number. This one shows you the previous reading and, deliberately, not a consensus forecast. That is worth explaining, because it is a choice, not an omission. Consensus forecasts are compiled and sold by data vendors under licences that forbid republishing them for free. A calendar that prints a consensus number for every event is either paying for that data or lifting it against the terms. This one does neither. The forecast is the one figure you bring from your own platform or read off the release itself.

What matters more than the absolute number is the surprise: the gap between what came out and what the market expected. A jobs report of 150,000 is bullish or bearish depending entirely on whether the consensus was 100,000 or 250,000. The number in isolation tells you nothing about how price will react; the distance from expectations tells you almost everything. So the useful habit is to note the consensus before the release, then watch the gap, rather than reacting to the headline figure on its own.

The calendar's value lies in the direction of the read. Beside each event that carries one, it clearly states in basic terms how a higher (or lower) print will normally affect the bond market and, as an effect of the central bank, the currency. A hotter inflation number usually has a bearish impact on bonds, but may be slightly positive for the currency, due to increased pressure on the central bank to raise interest rates. A weak jobs report would likely result in the opposite. The relationship between these factors is more of a tendency than a rule and, although the market can price the exact opposite of the expected response, if the number confirmed fears many had previously held, it could happen. Understanding how others normally react to releases is what differentiates reading releases from having an understanding of them. Most other calendars seem to take for granted you know this.

The impact tier does related work. High-impact releases are the ones that can move the whole market in a second: rate decisions, inflation, the monthly jobs report. Medium-impact releases can jolt a currency or a sector if they miss badly. Low-impact releases are worth logging but rarely worth trading around. Filtering the calendar to high impact only is the fastest way to see the week that actually matters, stripped of the noise.

The releases that actually move markets

Not all data is equal, and a good calendar makes the hierarchy obvious. At the top sit the central-bank rate decisions: the Federal Reserve's FOMC, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England. These are the single biggest scheduled events for most markets, because the interest rate is the price of money and everything else is priced off it. A decision that surprises, or a statement that shifts the expected path of rates, can move bonds, currencies and equities together in the same minute. If you trade anything macro, the rate-decision dates are the ones to put in first.

Inflation is the next tier and, in the current era, often the loudest. US CPI, euro-area HICP, and the Fed's preferred PCE measure each tell the market how much room the central bank has to cut or how much pressure it is under to hold. An inflation surprise reprices rate expectations directly, which is why CPI day is frequently the most volatile session of the month. The calendar carries the flash and final inflation releases for the euro area and the monthly US prints, each with its directional read attached.

Then we have to look at the labor market. The U.S. Jobs Report (the Employment Situation) is an event every first Friday and it can be a significant tone setter for weeks. The Weekly jobless claims figure is the best, most frequent indicator of whether or not the economy has started to turn around. Labor markets across the Atlantic are similar. Solid employment statistics generally support tightening monetary policy and higher yield. A large drop in employment numbers is often about the only thing that will prompt a central bank to act prior to its next meeting.

Growth and activity round it out: GDP, both the early flash estimates and the later revisions, plus retail sales, industrial production, PPI and the sentiment surveys that try to see around the corner. These rarely move markets the way a rate decision does, but they shape the narrative the bigger releases get read against. A run of soft activity data changes how the market interprets the next inflation print, which is why the medium-impact releases are worth watching even when they do not move price on the day.

Central-bank decisions, and why they dominate the calendar

Rate decisions sit at the top of every impact ranking on this calendar, and it is worth understanding why the FOMC, the ECB and the Bank of England get the highest tier without exception. Part of it is obvious: the interest rate is the price of money, and repricing it repositions every other asset. But the deeper reason is that a rate decision is rarely a single number. It is a two-part event, and the second part usually matters more than the first.

The decision itself, the hold or the move, is often the least surprising thing about the day, because the market has spent weeks pricing it and usually gets it right. What moves markets is the guidance around it: the wording of the statement, the vote split among the committee, the projections a bank like the Fed publishes for the path of rates, and the press conference where the chair can shift the whole outlook with a sentence. A central bank can hold rates exactly as expected and still trigger a violent move by signalling that the next cut is further away than the market hoped. A hawkish hold can sell bonds harder than a dovish cut.

That is why a rate-decision entry on the calendar is best read as the start of a window rather than a single instant. The Federal Reserve announces at 2:00pm Eastern and the chair speaks half an hour later; the ECB decides at 14:15 in Frankfurt and holds its press conference at 14:45; the Bank of England publishes at noon UK time with the minutes and the vote attached. The calendar marks the decision time, and the real volatility often arrives in the press conference that follows.

It also explains why the data releases in between meetings matter so much. Every CPI print, every jobs report, is the market repricing what the central bank will be forced to do at its next meeting. An inflation surprise does not move markets because inflation itself changed the world overnight; it moves them because it changed the odds on the next rate decision. Read that way, the whole calendar hangs together: the rate decisions are the events, and the data between them is the market keeping score on what the next decision will be.

Coverage: the major economies and their central banks

An economic calendar is only as useful as the markets it covers. This one is built out from the economies that move global prices, and it is straight with you about where it currently reaches. The United States is the deepest: CPI, the Employment Situation, PPI, GDP, PCE inflation, retail sales, industrial production, housing starts, new home sales, weekly jobless claims, JOLTS, consumer credit, the trade balance and the FOMC rate decision, each on its scheduled date with the standard release time converted to your timezone.

The euro area is next, and it covers both halves of what moves the single currency. The European Central Bank's Governing Council rate decisions are in, dated to the day the decision is announced. Alongside them sit Eurostat's headline euro-area releases: flash and final HICP inflation, the flash and preliminary GDP estimates, unemployment, industrial production, producer prices, retail trade, economic sentiment, construction and trade. Between the ECB and Eurostat, a euro trader has the schedule that actually matters.

In addition to representing the Bank of England through its Bank Rate decisions for the UK, this calendar represents the key drivers of the GBP (events) as well as the Gilt Market, with these event times sourced directly from the Bank of England's own published schedule. As for non-UK Central Banks, we have added to the calendar, every single major central bank's interest rates decisions; i.e., the Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Swiss National Bank, and the Bank of Japan. Each of their interest rate announcements are based on their respective banks' calendars, but now they will be announced at the exact time and date they occur and adjusted for your local clock. To a macro-trader, this is essentially the backbone of the global trading week. Interest rate decisions made in Ottawa, Sydney and/or Tokyo will impact currencies, bonds, and indices simultaneously and to an equal extent as a Federal Reserve decision would back home. Now, they will all appear on one screen.

National statistics fill in around those decisions. Spain contributes its headline INE releases, the consumer price index, quarterly national accounts, the labour force survey, retail trade and industrial production. Canada adds the three Statistics Canada series markets actually watch, CPI, GDP and the Labour Force Survey, read live from the agency's own release schedule. Australia brings the ABS headline data as it enters the forward window, its quarterly and monthly CPI, the labour force report and producer prices. Germany contributes its monthly unemployment figures from the Federal Employment Agency, one of the euro area's most-watched national labour prints. Japan adds its national consumer price index and quarterly GDP, along with the Tokyo-area CPI that lands about three weeks ahead of the national print and trades as an early signal. Each new national office slots in the same way, behind the same impact tiers and the same directional reads.

Every event carries a country flag, and typing a country name into the search box narrows the calendar to it, so a dollar trader can hide everything that is not American and a yen trader can pull up Japan alone. More countries are on the way, and the design is built to absorb them: each new statistics office or central bank drops into the same schedule without a redesign. What is here already spans the economies and the central banks that set the price of money across the world's biggest markets, without the padding of minor releases that never move a price.

For forex traders

Foreign exchange is the market the economic calendar was built for. Currencies trade the difference in interest rates between two economies, and the calendar is the schedule of the events that move that difference. When the Federal Reserve raises rates faster than the market expected, the dollar tends to rise against everything; when euro-area inflation comes in soft and the market pulls forward an ECB cut, the euro tends to fall. Every high-impact event on this calendar is, for a forex trader, a scheduled repricing of a currency.

The country tag on each event is really a currency tag. Filter the calendar to the United States and you are looking at the dollar's week: CPI, the jobs report, PCE and the FOMC. Filter to the euro area and you have the euro's drivers, the ECB decision and Eurostat's inflation and growth. Add the United Kingdom and you have the pound. A trader who lives in EUR/USD and GBP/USD can set the calendar to three countries and see, in one column, almost everything scheduled that can move their book. The directional reads are written in exactly these terms, because a hotter inflation print pushing the central bank toward tighter policy is, above all, a currency event.

Timing matters as much as the release itself, because a number only moves a pair hard when that pair's market is liquid. US data at 8:30am Eastern lands in the middle of the London-New York overlap, the deepest liquidity of the day, which is part of why it moves so violently. The same release at a quiet hour would move less. Before you plan a trade around a number, it is worth checking whether your session is even open with the market hours tool, and worth remembering that the first minutes after a big release are often the worst time to enter, not the best.

The calendar is the back half of a currency process, not the whole of it. Use the directional reads here to know which way a surprise should push a pair, gauge relative momentum across the majors with the currency strength meter, and if you hold positions overnight, price the rate differential you are earning or paying with the carry trade table. The release tells you when the differential might reprice; those tools tell you what it is now. A forex economic calendar that also tells you what a beat or miss means, in plain language, is doing the part of the job the others leave to you.

For stock and index traders

Equity traders sometimes treat the economic calendar as a forex thing, and it costs them. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq are priced off the discount rate as surely as any bond, which means the same inflation prints and rate decisions that move currencies move stock indices, often harder. A hot CPI is bad for equities because it lifts the path of interest rates, and a higher rate makes future earnings worth less today; a dovish central bank does the reverse and tends to lift the whole index. On a CPI or FOMC day, the index future can travel a full session's range in the minutes after the release.

For an index trader, then, the schedule that matters is the US high-impact block: CPI, the jobs report, PCE, retail sales and the FOMC decision, with the same events from the euro area and the UK if you trade the DAX or the FTSE. Those are the scheduled moments each month that gap the market or reverse a trend, and the directional read tells you which way the surprise usually points the index.

There is a second calendar equity traders live by, and this is not that calendar. Individual companies move on earnings, and an earnings calendar is a company-by-company schedule of a different kind. This is the macro half: the releases that move the whole index at once, rather than a single name after the close. The two work together. A single stock can beat its earnings and still fall because CPI that morning repriced the entire market, and knowing the macro schedule is what stops that from being a surprise.

For crypto traders

Crypto is an around-the-clock market; however, it is by no means traded in isolation. The past couple of years have seen bitcoin and the larger token set behave similarly to those high-beta risk assets that react to similar macros as stocks and bonds do (the Federal Reserve, U.S. inflation rate, monthly jobs report). Frequently CPI Day and FOMC Day are two of the most volatile days in crypto due to neither mentioning crypto; rather, each resets the price of risk, with crypto being priced as one of the highest-risk assets you can own. Thusly, a crypto trader's economic calendar is largely a macro calendar.

So the high-impact US events and the major rate decisions are the ones a crypto trader watches here, the handful each month that can turn a quiet range into a liquidation cascade. The always-on market sharpens this: a release that lands during a thin weekend or overnight order book can move harder than the same number would in a deep session, because there is less depth to absorb it.

This calendar does not include native scheduling for cryptocurrency: unlocking tokens; upgrading to mainnet; listing exchanges. These events have their own types of trackers and calendars. The only recurring date for crypto worthy of noting is the Bitcoin halving, which is listed as an individual countdown versus a calendar entry due to the event being so infrequently (years) occurring. For all other macro-crypto related events, however, this will be your go-to resource. Using this in combination with position through our funding dashboard, and sentiment via the fear and greed index provides a much fuller understanding than viewing a price chart alone.

Trading around a release, and when not to

The minute a high-impact number lands is the most dangerous slot on the clock, and knowing a release is coming is only useful if you also know how to behave around it. In the first seconds after CPI or a rate decision, spreads widen, liquidity thins, and price can spike both ways before it settles. That whipsaw runs the stops on both sides, longs and shorts, before the real move begins, and then the market goes wherever it was always going to go. A stop that sits safely in a quiet market is easy prey in that spike.

So the calendar's most valuable use is often defensive. Knowing a release is due tells you when not to be holding a tight stop, when to trim size, when to simply be flat and watch. There is no rule that says you have to have a position on for every number. Some of the best decisions a data-aware trader makes are the trades not taken in the ninety seconds around an event they have no edge on.

For those who do trade the release, the edge is in the reaction rather than the number. Fading the first spike, waiting for the retrace, or trading the trend that establishes a few minutes later are all approaches with a logic behind them; entering at market on the print, into the widest spread of the day, rarely is. This is also where the directional read earns its place: if the number is hawkish and the currency falls anyway, that wrong-way reaction is information, usually a sign the market had already priced an even bigger move and is now unwinding it.

The calendar tells you where the risk sits on the week's clock. What you do with that is a matter of discipline, not schedule, and it pairs best with a position size chosen in advance with the position size calculator, so that no single release, however it breaks, can do lasting damage.

A week on the calendar, read in advance

The whole point of a calendar is to read the week before it happens rather than during it. A typical week has a shape. The early days are often quiet, second-tier activity data that shifts a sector but not the whole market, building toward one or two events that are the real fulcrum. Suppose the week ahead has US CPI on Wednesday at 8:30 Eastern, the ECB decision on Thursday in the early Frankfurt afternoon, and nothing major on Friday. You now know the shape: the dollar's risk is Wednesday morning, the euro's is Thursday, and Friday you can breathe. Or the month turns and the first Friday brings the US jobs report, the loudest scheduled event there is, and everything before it is just positioning into it.

Reading the week this way changes how you trade the days around it. You do not put a large EUR/USD position on late Tuesday if CPI and an ECB decision are both landing inside the next forty-eight hours; you wait for them, or you size for the volatility you know is coming. You note the exact local time of each one so you are at the screen when it matters, or deliberately away from it. You add the two or three that actually touch your market to your own calendar, so the reminders find you even if the week gets busy.

The entire application is built to foster this behavior. Looking at lists for hours does not foster the behavior; looking at your week ahead on Sundays, marking those handful of times when something can actually impact what you are trading, and then organizing your weeks based on those events rather than having events ambush you. This is where the trader that gets knocked off their feet by data typically finds themselves.

In your timezone, in your language

Two small frictions sink most economic calendars, and this one removes both. The first is time. A release schedule is useless if you have to convert every entry from Eastern or Central European time to your own, in your head, before you know when to be at the screen. Every time on this calendar is shown in your device's local timezone automatically. US CPI at 8:30am Eastern appears in your clock, whatever your clock is, with no UTC table and no mental arithmetic. Get the timezone wrong on a rate decision and you are at your desk an hour late; the calendar makes that impossible.

The second is language. Most calendars are English-only, which is an odd default for a market that trades in every timezone on earth. This one runs in eight languages, with a full localized edition for each, so the interface, the event descriptions and the directional reads are in the language you think in rather than the one the tool happened to ship in.

It is a web page, not an app you install, so it opens in the browser on a phone, a laptop or a desktop with nothing to download and no account to make. Search it for a release by name, jump straight to a date, or filter by impact, by event type or by country, and the view narrows to exactly the events you are watching. None of that needs a login, because there is nothing to log in to. You open the page and the calendar is there, in your time and your language.

Add any release to your own calendar

A schedule only helps if you are looking at it, and nobody watches an economic calendar all day. So every event carries an add-to-calendar button that hands you a standard iCalendar file. Click it and the release drops into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, whatever you already run your life in, with a reminder attached. Your phone tells you the jobs report is in an hour while you are doing something else entirely, which is exactly when you need to be told.

This is what downloading an economic calendar should mean in practice: not a spreadsheet of every release you will never read, but the one event you care about, dropped into the calendar you already check, with an alert so it cannot slip past you. The file is the open iCalendar standard, so it works in any calendar app without conversion, and it carries the event's directional read in the notes, so when the reminder fires you also see what a beat or a miss is likely to do.

There is no account, no email and no signup anywhere in this. Nothing you do on the page is stored or sent; the add-to-calendar file is generated in your browser at the moment you click. The one thing it is not, yet, is a single subscribe-once feed that keeps your calendar in sync as the schedule updates, which is a fair thing to want and is on the list. For now it is per-event and deliberate: you choose the releases that matter to you and add them, one click each, to the calendar that already runs your day.

Where the data comes from

The reason to trust an economic calendar is where it gets its dates, and this is the part most calendars would rather you not think about. The large commercial calendars assemble their schedules from data vendors whose terms forbid redisplaying that data for free. It is a quiet dependency, and it breaks in public: this site once ran a calendar on the Forex Factory and Nasdaq feeds, removed both when it became clear their terms did not permit it, and rebuilt the whole thing on official sources only. What you see now is sourced the slow, defensible way.

Every date comes from the agency that publishes the release itself. US dates are pulled from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED API, which carries the forward schedules of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve. Euro-area dates come from Eurostat's own release calendar and the ECB's published meeting dates. UK decisions come from the Bank of England's calendar, Canadian releases from Statistics Canada's key-indicators schedule, and Australian releases from the ABS calendar. The rate decisions of the Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan each come from that bank's own published dates, and Spanish releases from the INE. These are the primary publishers, the bodies that set the dates in the first place, so the schedule is the real one rather than a copy of a copy.

All of it is public-domain or openly licensed, which is what makes the calendar free. There is no account, no email and nothing uploaded, because the schedule is baked from those official sources ahead of time and served as static data; your visit fetches nothing and sends nothing. The one attribution the sources ask for is carried on the page: this product uses the FRED API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The same sourcing decision is why there is no consensus forecast column. Forecasts are the vendors' proprietary product, and putting them here for free would repeat exactly the licensing problem that got the old feeds removed. So the calendar gives you the parts that are public, the dates, the times and the historical context, and adds its own plain-language read of what each release means, rather than borrowing a number it has no right to hand out.

Big-company earnings dates are sourced the same principled way and carry the same honest limit. There is no licensed earnings-calendar feed behind them, official or commercial, because none exists to use for free. Instead, each date is estimated from that company's own history of filing an 8-K with the SEC around its results, going back several years, with the noisy filings (a company that also files 8-Ks for unrelated events) filtered out before a pattern is trusted. Every earnings entry says "(estimated)" for exactly this reason: it is a well-informed guess from public filing history, not a confirmed date from the company, and it can land a few days off. No EPS estimate, analyst count or market cap is shown, because that is the vendors' proprietary product too.

The data behind it, free

All information displayed on the calendar will be available in plain JSON format through the exact API endpoint from which the web page retrieves its own data. Using this JSON data will enable developers to build their application (a dashboard, a chatbot, an excel document etc) using structured data from the weekly release schedule rather than having to scrape the structureless rendered HTML, with no additional cost and without needing an api key.

A caveat, stated plainly. It is the site's own data endpoint, free and open, returning the upcoming events with their date, time, impact tier and country. There is no formal, versioned public API with support guarantees behind it yet, so treat it as a convenience rather than something to build a business on. If a proper, documented economic calendar API turns out to be something people actually want, it is a short step from what already exists. For now the useful fact is simple: the data is free, it is JSON, and there is no sign-up between you and it.

What to look for in the best economic calendar

Every trader eventually asks which economic calendar is the best one, and the honest answer is that "best" is a short checklist rather than a brand name. Hold any calendar you are considering against it. Do the dates come from official sources, or are they scraped from a vendor who can change the terms and make them vanish? Are the releases sorted into impact tiers, so the market-movers stand out from the statistical noise? Does it tell you what a beat or a miss actually means, or just that a number is due? Are the times in your own timezone without you doing the maths? Can you get a release into the calendar you already use? Is it free, with no signup and no paywall waiting to appear once you rely on it? And does it cover the economies you actually trade?

A lot of those calendars get some of this right and miss all else. They have scope, as well as the vendor supplied consensus numbers for each feature set. However, many calendar vendors also limit their users' ability to use features, and obscure the meaning of each new release by using vendor created buzzwords. Many also require licenses that force users to shut down online calendars. On the other hand there are calendars that are light weight and free, but very limited in content. Many of them just display the date(s) with little or no context about why a particular date is important.

This one was built against the full checklist. Official-only sourcing, so the dates do not depend on anyone's terms of service. Impact tiers and a plain-language directional read on every event that carries one. Times in your timezone, in eight languages, with one-click add-to-calendar, and no account anywhere in it. It covers the major economies and every big central bank rather than every minor national statistic, and it does not print a consensus number, and it says so plainly. What it does, it does in the parts of the job the others treat as optional: telling you what the release means, and coming from sources that will still be there next year.