Average Fed Mfg Survey: General business activity: Current (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 was 14.1 (share of CEOs seeing a recent increase minus share reporting a decrease) in September 2026, compared to 17.5 in August 2026.
Sample. There are 268 observations in the monthly series displayed in the figure above. The series covers the time range stretching from June 2004 to September 2026.
History. Here's a snapshot of some descriptive statistics computed on the entire sample: the diffusion index hit a trough of -66.6 in April 2020; it reached a maximum of 40.2 in April 2021; it had an average value of 3.8.
Latest values
| Date | Value - Percentage points |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-31 | 14.9500 |
| 2026-08-31 | 17.4750 |
| 2026-09-30 | 14.0750 |
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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 | 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 |
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