Average Fed Mfg Survey: General business activity: Future (increase vs decrease; diffusion index; percentage points; seasonally unadjusted) - 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 unadjusted diffusion index for general business activity stood at 21.6 (share of CEOs seeing a future increase minus share forecasting a decrease) in September 2026, compared to 30.4 in August.
Sample. In this monthly time series, there are a total of 268 observations. The series covers the time period extending from June 2004 to September 2026.
History. Have a look at some descriptive statistics calculated on the full sample: the diffusion index achieved a maximum of 53.6 in January 2017; it recorded a bottom of -22.5 in October 2022; it had a mean value of 24.4.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Percentage points |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-31 | 21.5750 |
| 2026-08-31 | 30.4250 |
| 2026-09-30 | 21.6500 |
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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 | No |
| 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 |
Series in the same data set
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