Average Fed Mfg Survey: General business activity: Future (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 28.2 (share of CEOs seeing a future increase minus share forecasting a decrease) in September 2026, versus 39.7 in August.
Sample. There are 268 records overall in the monthly series displayed in the plot above. The time range covered by the series is from June 2004 to September 2026.
History. Here's a snapshot of a few simple statistics we computed on the entire sample: the diffusion index hit a minimum of -17.0 in October 2022; it hit a peak of 50.7 in November 2004; it had a mean value of 24.6.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Percentage points |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-31 | 26.9500 |
| 2026-08-31 | 39.7250 |
| 2026-09-30 | 28.1750 |
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Series Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Diffusion index for the question: Will general business activity increase or decrease over the next six months? |
| Country | United States |
| Economic concept | Business survey response |
| Data type | Leading 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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