@pipeworx/bls

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

Tools: 5

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.

4. Local-area unemployment by place name. “What’s the unemployment rate in Wake County, NC?” or “Cary, North Carolina” or “Fargo-Moorhead MSA” → bls_local_unemployment({place, state?}). This is the tool for LAUS (Local Area Unemployment Statistics) lookups by county / metro area / city — bls_search’s curated catalog has no local-area entries, and constructing a LAUS series ID by hand requires a place → BLS area-code crosswalk (~8,000 US counties/metros/cities) that isn’t something to guess at. bls_local_unemployment resolves the name against that crosswalk itself (bundled from BLS’s la.area reference file), returns candidates when the name is ambiguous, and falls back to the county — saying so explicitly — when a city is below the LAUS city-reporting threshold.

Reading the response

bls_get_series returns each series newest first — the payload says so in observation_order, so you don’t have to infer the direction from the dates. count is the number of points for that series, and BLS returns every point in the requested year range, so it is never a total sitting beside a shorter list.

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 national/state/industry IDs from scratch — use bls_search or bls_popular_series. For LAUS local-area IDs (county/MSA/city) specifically, use bls_local_unemployment({place, state?}) — it resolves the place name to the correct area code for you.

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.
• bls_local_unemployment — Look up the current LOCAL-AREA unemployment rate (or employment/labor force) for a US county, metro area (MSA), or city/town by NAME — e.g. “Wake County, NC”, “Cary, North Carolina”, “Fargo-Moorhead M