Ten US economic indicators

The three labels describe when a series moves relative to the wider business cycle. Leading indicators change before the economy turns; most of them come from the parts of the economy that react first to interest rates and expectations, such as the Treasury yield spread, household sentiment, and the permits that must be issued before any ground is broken. Coincident indicators turn at roughly the same time as the cycle, so their job is to confirm where the economy is now rather than to predict: real GDP, retail sales and industrial production belong here, and they are exactly the kinds of data the NBER weighs when it dates a recession. Lagging indicators move only after the turning point, because firms take time to adjust headcount and prices pass through more slowly still, which is why unemployment, core inflation and payrolls usually turn later than output. It is worth being clear that the grouping is about timing, not reliability: a turn in a leading indicator does not guarantee a recession, and a lagging indicator is not useless — confirming that the turn really happened is precisely what it is for. This site follows the established grouping and does not invent one, nor does it combine the ten series into any single score.

A level is simply what the indicator measured in that period — an unemployment rate in percent, or building permits in thousands of units. A year-over-year rate is the percentage change from the same period twelve months earlier, which strips out seasonality and most of the long-run trend; a monthly change is the difference from the previous period, which is how nonfarm payrolls are stored. Each series here is stored in whichever form it is most commonly quoted: core CPI, retail sales and industrial production as year-over-year rates; the unemployment rate, the yield spread, consumer sentiment, building permits and housing starts as levels; real GDP as a quarterly change at an annual rate; and nonfarm payrolls as a monthly change in thousands of jobs. Every chart caption states in words which transform it is drawing and what the source units are, because the same number means wildly different things under different transforms — the large figure in the core CPI cell is a percentage change, not an index value. One trap is worth naming: a falling year-over-year rate means prices or sales are rising more slowly, not that they are falling. For that, the rate has to go below zero.

A seasonally adjusted annual rate is a figure with the seasonal pattern removed and then scaled up to a full-year pace. Seasonal adjustment strips out the swings that repeat every year, such as the winter lull in construction or the year-end shopping season, so that neighbouring months or quarters can be compared directly. This page uses it in two ways. Building permits and housing starts are levels at a seasonally adjusted annual rate: the number of units there would be over a whole year if the month’s pace held, not the units actually permitted or started that month. Real GDP’s quarterly change at an annual rate compounds one quarter’s growth into a yearly rate, which makes it roughly four times the quarter’s own growth. So the GDP figure cannot be compared directly with a year-over-year rate — one is a single quarter’s pace stretched to a year, the other is the actual change from a year earlier.

Real GDP is compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which has to reconcile household consumption, business investment, government spending, inventories and trade into one consistent set of accounts. The source data behind those pieces arrive at monthly, quarterly and annual frequencies, and the whole thing then has to be deflated to get a figure in real terms. That reconciliation cannot be done every month, which is why GDP is a quarterly series. The release schedule follows from the same constraint: an advance estimate about a month after the quarter ends, then a revision in each of the next two months, with annual and comprehensive revisions reaching further back after that. In other words, by the time the latest quarter is published, the period it describes ended one to four months ago. That is exactly why it sits among the coincident indicators here rather than being treated as a live reading: it confirms where the economy was, accurately but slowly. For something timelier, monthly retail sales and industrial production cover parts of the same activity and are published far sooner. This site labels a quarter of GDP by the date of its first month, and the key facts and the summary table follow that convention.

The University of Michigan survey moved to a web-only methodology during 2024, and the change in how people are interviewed shifts the level of the series around that point, so comparisons spanning it need care. Nothing is adjusted here: the chart draws the values exactly as FRED publishes them, and the parenthesis in that cell’s caption only flags that the break exists — the data itself is untouched.

Automatically, once every weekday. All ten series come from FRED at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and the agencies that compile them are the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the unemployment rate UNRATE, core CPI CPILFESL and nonfarm payrolls PAYEMS), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (real GDP GDPC1), the Census Bureau (building permits PERMIT, housing starts HOUST and retail sales RSXFS), the Federal Reserve Board (industrial production INDPRO and the 10-year minus 2-year spread T10Y2Y), and the University of Michigan (consumer sentiment UMCSENT). The series themselves are monthly or quarterly, but those agencies publish on dates spread right across the month — the employment report early, CPI mid-month, building permits around the 17th, GDP at the end — so refetching daily gets new observations live as soon as they appear, and a run that finds nothing new changes nothing. The full fetched dataset, every observation included, is published as JSON at /data/indicators.json. This is a personal project with no affiliation to any of those agencies; the page is a data monitoring tool and does not constitute investment advice.