Average Fed Mfg Survey: General business activity: Current (increase vs decrease; diffusion index; percentage points; seasonally adjusted) - United States - FSR - Monthly
This series is part of the dataset: Average Fed Mfg Survey (FetchSeries Research)
Download Full Dataset (.xlsx)Latest updates. Based on an average of regional Federal Reserve manufacturing surveys, the seasonally adjusted diffusion index for general business activity was 12.3 (share of CEOs seeing a recent increase minus share reporting a decrease) in September 2026, compared to 20.9 in August.
Sample. There are 268 data points in the monthly series presented in the plot above. The time span covered by the series goes from June 2004 to September 2026.
History. Here's a snapshot of some descriptive statistics we computed on the entire sample: the diffusion index had a mean of 3.8; it recorded a maximum of 36.4 in July 2004; it recorded a bottom of -74.1 in April 2020.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Percentage points |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-31 | 17.0750 |
| 2026-08-31 | 20.9000 |
| 2026-09-30 | 12.3000 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Diffusion index for the question: Did general business activity increase or decrease in the past month? |
| Country | United States |
| Economic concept | Business survey response |
| Data type | Coincident indicator of the business cycle |
| Seasonally adjusted | Yes |
| Deflation method | Not applicable |
| Rescaling | None |
| Measure type | Diffusion index (share of respondents reporting an increase minus share reporting a decrease) |
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Unit | Percentage points |
| Source | FetchSeries Research calculations on Federal Reserve data |
| Source type | Data research lab |
| Data licence | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) + FetchSeries disclaimers |
| Other information | Arithmetic average across 4 regional Federal Reserve manufacturing surveys |
| FSR temporal aggregation code | LM01 |
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