FXMacroData vs Forex Factory: Economic Calendar API Alternative for FX Traders

This comparison is for FX traders, Expert Advisor developers, and quant analysts who already use the Forex Factory calendar and now want the same information inside code: a trading bot, a news filter, a backtest, an alert, or an AI assistant. The question it answers is simple: is there a Forex Factory API, and if not, what should an automated FX workflow use instead?

The short finding: Forex Factory is an excellent free calendar and community for reading the week ahead, but it does not offer a documented developer API. Its weekly export carries the schedule, impact rating, forecast, and previous value, but not the actual released number and only for the current week. FXMacroData is built for the step Forex Factory leaves to the reader: official-source actual values with second-level announcement_datetime stamps, release history, a release calendar, and REST, streaming, and MCP access under published pricing.

Decision snapshot

Keep using Forex Factory when

You read the calendar by eye, rely on the red/orange/yellow impact folders, and value forum discussion, trade journals, and news alongside the schedule. It costs nothing.

Choose FXMacroData when

Code needs the actual number the moment it is published, with an exact timestamp, history for backtests, and a supported API key instead of a scraper.

Quick answer

There is no official Forex Factory API. Use Forex Factory to plan the week; use FXMacroData when a system has to act on the release.

Takeaway: the two products are complementary for a human trader, but only one of them is designed to be called by software.

Pricing And Access

Forex Factory is free to use. The calendar, forums, news, and trade explorer are available on the website without a subscription, and the weekly export files linked from the calendar sidebar are downloadable without a key. There is no paid data plan and no published API pricing, because there is no API product to buy.

FXMacroData publishes self-serve pricing. The Always Free tier needs no key and covers USD data with 100 requests per day, with USD announcements delayed by 15 minutes. The Individual plan is $50/month or $500/year with a 14-day trial and 1,000,000 requests per month (bursts of 300 per minute, 5,000 per hour, and 20 concurrent requests). Business is $250/month or $2,500/year for companies and teams of up to 10 people, with the same monthly allowance and priority support. Enterprise is available by custom agreement, and a self-serve Commercial Redistribution add-on costs $10/month per block of up to 100 measured users or 1,000 public-feed followers.

Forex Factory website

Free*

Calendar, forums, news, and current-week export files. No API keys, no documented API, no service commitment.

FXMacroData Always Free

$0

USD data, no key, 100 requests/day, USD announcements delayed 15 minutes.

FXMacroData Individual

$50/month

22 currencies, 1,000,000 requests/month, real-time releases, 14-day trial. $500/year option.

Takeaway: Forex Factory wins on price for reading the calendar. The real cost of using it in code is the scraper you build and maintain, which FXMacroData replaces with a supported key from $50/month.

Is There A Forex Factory API?

No. Forex Factory, a brand of Fair Economy, Inc., does not publish API documentation, API keys, rate limits, or developer terms. What it does publish is a "Weekly Export" panel in the calendar sidebar with ICS, CSV, JSON, and XML links to files hosted on a Fair Economy domain. Most search results for "Forex Factory API" point to that JSON file or to third-party scrapers built on top of the calendar page.

The weekly JSON export is useful, but it is narrower than many developers expect. Each row has exactly six fields, and the file covers only the current week. The lastweek and nextweek variants of the URL returned not-found responses when checked.

What a weekly export row contains, and what an automated workflow still needs

In the Forex Factory JSON row

• title: event name
• country: currency code, or "All"
• date: scheduled time with a US Eastern offset
• impact: High, Medium, Low, or Holiday
• forecast: consensus text such as "1.9%", often blank
• previous: prior value as text

Missing for automation

• The actual released value
• The exact time the number became available
• Numeric types instead of formatted strings
• Release history beyond the current week
• Revisions and official source links
• Authentication, rate limits, and a stable contract

Takeaway: the export tells a bot when something is scheduled and how important it is, but not what was released, so it cannot drive a surprise-based trade or a backtest on its own.

The export checked for the week starting 4 October 2026 listed 79 events across nine currencies (AUD, CAD, CHF, CNY, EUR, GBP, JPY, NZD, USD) plus a handful of "All" rows such as OPEC meetings. Events that had already been released earlier that week still showed only forecast and previous values. That is the core gap: the website calendar shows actuals as they arrive, but the export does not.

Scraping, Reliability, And Terms

Because actuals appear on the calendar page but not in the export, the common workaround is to scrape the page itself. That route is fragile. A plain scripted request to the calendar page was refused with HTTP 403, while a browser-like request was served, so scrapers depend on mimicking a browser and on page markup that can change without notice. Several scraper "actors" on marketplaces such as Apify sell pay-per-result access to Forex Factory calendar data; they are third-party tools, not Forex Factory products.

There is also a terms question. Forex Factory's public Notices page says the copying, republication, or redistribution of its content, explicitly including calendar schedules and specs, is prohibited without prior written consent, and its terms ask users not to access the services through methods other than the interface provided. Reading the calendar for your own trading is what the site is built for. Building a commercial product or a redistributed feed on scraped calendar data may conflict with those terms, so teams should review them or ask Fair Economy before relying on that route.

For a personal Expert Advisor news filter, the practical risks are breakage and silent staleness: a layout change or a blocked request can leave a bot trading through a release it thinks is hours away. For a business, the licensing exposure matters as much as the engineering.

Side-By-Side Comparison

* Competitor pricing retrieved from Forex Factory's public website and calendar pages in October 2026.

Release Timing And Actual Values

For a discretionary trader, Forex Factory's calendar does the job well: you see the event count down, then the actual appears on the page with green or red colouring against the forecast. The weakness only shows up when a program has to act. The export has no actual field, and the website does not publish a measurement of how quickly actuals appear after the official release.

FXMacroData treats timing as part of the data. Every release row carries a second-level announcement_datetime, and releases are typically available within seconds of official publication. The target is one second from publication, and the release-speed record shows the share of releases that met it by source and lists every release that took longer.

One US payrolls release, two data paths

Week ahead

Both show the scheduled 08:30 ET release. Forex Factory adds its High impact folder; FXMacroData lists it in /v1/calendar/usd.

Publication

The statistics agency publishes. FXMacroData records the value with its timestamp and source link, typically within seconds.

Bot reads

The Forex Factory export still shows forecast and previous only. A bot needs a page scraper to find the actual.

Next month

The FXMacroData row joins the history used for backtests. The export file has rolled to a new week.

Takeaway: Forex Factory is strongest before the release; FXMacroData is built for the seconds and months after it.

Coverage And History

Forex Factory's calendar concentrates on the major currencies, which suits most retail FX traders. It also lists speeches, auctions, holidays, and events such as OPEC meetings that are useful context but are not data series. FXMacroData covers 22 currencies in its production API, including emerging and Nordic markets such as BRL, KRW, NOK, SEK, and HUF, across more than 700 indicator series: policy rates, CPI and core CPI, GDP, non-farm payrolls, unemployment, PMIs, retail sales, trade, current account, and wages. Each series carries source metadata naming the publishing agency or central bank.

History is where the difference matters most for system builders. A backtest of a Fed policy rate surprise strategy on USD/JPY needs years of actual values with release times, plus revisions so you know what was known when. Forex Factory lets a person page back through past weeks on the site, but there is no supported way to pull that history into code. FXMacroData serves it through the same endpoint that delivers the live release, alongside FX spot rates, CFTC COT positioning, government bond yields, commodities, and central-bank press releases from the Federal Reserve, ECB, Bank of Japan, and Bank of England.

API Example

An FXMacroData request sends the key in the X-API-Key header. This call returns US non-farm payrolls releases:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/usd/non_farm_payrolls"

Example response (abridged and illustrative; the live response includes more metadata fields):

{
  "currency": "USD",
  "indicator": "non_farm_payrolls",
  "source": "BLS",
  "data": [
    {
      "date": "2026-09-30",
      "val": 159044000.0,
      "change": 29000.0,
      "announcement_datetime": 1790944200,
      "announcement_datetime_local": "2026-10-02T08:30:00-04:00",
      "source_url": "https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_10022026.htm",
      "pct_change_mom": 0.02,
      "revisions": [ ... ]
    }
  ]
}

Compare that with a Forex Factory export row: the FXMacroData row carries a numeric value rather than a formatted string, an epoch timestamp a program can compare directly with price data, the official release link, and revision history. A news filter in MetaTrader or a TradingView alert can key off the calendar endpoint before the event and the announcements endpoint after it.

Use-case storyboard: replacing a scraped news filter in an Expert Advisor

Before

The EA downloads the weekly export to pause trading around High impact events, and a scraper polls the page for actuals.

Schedule

The EA reads /v1/calendar/usd and /v1/calendar/jpy for the blackout windows.

Release

It reads the payrolls actual with its timestamp and compares it with the prior and optional forecast.

Review

The same rows feed a backtest of past releases, checked against the USD/JPY pair dashboard.

Takeaway: one supported data source replaces two fragile ones, and the live logic and the backtest read identical data.

Where Forex Factory Is Genuinely Stronger

Forex Factory has earned its place on many traders' second monitors, and a fair comparison should say so plainly. It is the better choice when you value:

• Price: the full calendar, forums, news, and tools are free.
• Familiar impact ratings: the red, orange, and yellow folders are a shared shorthand across the retail FX community, and many trading rules and EAs are written around them.
• Community and forum context: years of threads, trade journals, and real-time discussion around events, which a data API does not try to provide.
• Broad event schedule: speeches, auctions, holidays, and meetings appear alongside data releases, giving a full picture of the trading week.
• Visual week planning: a clean calendar view with filters, time-zone settings, and actuals coloured against forecasts.

If your workflow is a human reading the week ahead, Forex Factory may be all you need.

Where FXMacroData Is Stronger

FXMacroData is stronger as soon as the consumer of the data is software. It provides the actual value, the timestamp, the source, and the history through a supported API with published limits, so there is nothing to scrape and no markup to break. It also covers more currencies, links releases to pair context on dashboards such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and AUD/USD, and exposes the same data to AI assistants through the official MCP server.

FXMacroData pros

• Actual values with second-level timestamps and a public speed record.
• 22 currencies, 700+ series, multi-year history with revisions.
• REST, streaming, GraphQL, SDKs, and MCP under a supported key.

FXMacroData tradeoffs

• Full multi-currency access is paid from $50/month.
• Focused on data, not forum discussion or trade journals.
• Does not use Forex Factory's impact-folder ratings.

Forex Factory pros

• Free calendar, forums, news, and trade explorer.
• Widely recognised impact ratings.
• Large community and broad event schedule.

Forex Factory tradeoffs

• No documented API; export lacks actuals and history.
• Scraping is fragile and may conflict with site terms.
• No published latency or programmatic licence.

Takeaway: Forex Factory is the stronger free reading tool; FXMacroData is the stronger data source once a program, model, or agent needs to act.

Decision Matrix

Recommendation

Keep Forex Factory if you read the calendar yourself. It is free, the impact ratings are familiar, and its forums add context no data feed provides.

Move the automated part of your workflow to FXMacroData when a program has to act on releases: an Expert Advisor news filter, a surprise-based strategy, a backtest, a dashboard, or an AI assistant. Start with the free USD tier to test the response format, compare plans on the pricing page, read the API reference, and check the measured release speed before you commit. If you trade across sessions, the FX sessions dashboard and AI trading guides are useful next steps, and you can start the 14-day trial when ready.

Bottom line: there is no official Forex Factory API, and its weekly export has no actual values or history. Forex Factory remains a strong free calendar and community for human traders. FXMacroData is the supported alternative for FX workflows that run in code, with actuals, second-level timestamps, history, and published pricing from $50/month.

Sources Checked

Forex Factory claims are based on its public pages and weekly export files reviewed in October 2026. Re-check these pages for changes.

• Forex Factory calendar (Weekly Export panel, impact legend, actual values on the page)
• Forex Factory weekly JSON export (field list and currency coverage)
• Forex Factory Notices and terms (copyright, redistribution, and service usage)
• About Forex Factory (ownership by Fair Economy, Inc., and product list)
• FXMacroData pricing, API reference, and release-speed record

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