@pipeworx/bls

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bls/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 4

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s data warehouse. Employment, unemployment, wages, prices (CPI/PPI), productivity, occupational projections — the official US labor and price data. National, state, and metro level. Free with a registered API key.

Why this matters for AI agents

Anything labor-market or inflation-related at the official level: BLS. Where FRED gives you headline series, BLS gives you the underlying detail (occupation-level, industry-level, MSA-level). Agents researching local economic conditions, sector wages, or specific CPI components reach BLS directly.

Three core flows:

1. Look up a series. “What’s the metro Denver unemployment rate?” → bls_search({query: "Denver unemployment"}) → series IDs. Then bls_get_series({series_id}) for values.

2. Latest value. “What’s national unemployment right now?” → bls_latest({series_id: "LNS14000000"}) → most recent observation.

3. Browse popular series. “What does BLS publish?” → bls_popular_series → curated list of high-traffic IDs.

Auth

BLS API requires a free key from https://www.bls.gov/developers/. Without it, calls are throttled to ~25/day per IP. With a key, it’s 500/day. Pass via _apiKey per call.

Series ID structure

BLS series IDs encode survey, area, sector, and data type. Examples:

Don’t try to construct IDs from scratch — use bls_search or bls_popular_series.

Update cadence

Pipeworx caches BLS responses with TTLs aligned to release schedules.

Common pitfalls

• Seasonal adjustment. Same series exists in seasonally-adjusted (SA) and not-seasonally-adjusted (NSA) variants. Check the series ID prefix (LNS = SA, LNU = NSA). Mixing them is the most common analyst error.
• Annual averages vs monthly. Some IDs return only annual data; others return monthly. Read the metadata before plotting trends.
• State and metro coverage. Not every series exists at every geography. Smaller metros have larger lags and more imputed values.
• Inflation vs CPI. “Inflation” usually means CPI year-over-year change. To get YoY, request 13 months and compute, or use FRED’s CPIAUCSL with the pc1 units transformation (which does it for you).

Tools

• bls_get_series — Fetch historical time series data for employment, inflation, wages, productivity, or housing. Returns dated data points with values. Provide series ID (e.g., “PAYEMS” for total nonfarm employment).
• bls_search — Search BLS economic data series by keyword. Returns matching series IDs and titles. Use bls_get_series with an ID to fetch historical data points.
• bls_latest — Get the most recent data point for a BLS series. Returns latest value and date. Use when you need current figures without historical context.
• bls_popular_series — Browse popular BLS series by category: employment, inflation, wages, housing, productivity. Returns series IDs and descriptions. Start here to explore available data.