ForexFactory Scraper: Economic Calendar Data in 2026

The macro calendar everyone checks, one page at a time

Forex Factory (forexfactory.com) is a forex trading site best known for its economic calendar: the schedule of macro releases, central bank decisions and speeches for nine major currencies, each with an impact rating and the actual, forecast and previous figures. Traders and analysts check it to know when the market can move.

Using it as data is harder: figures display as text such as “175K” or “-0.4%”, and the site shows one date window at a time.

What you can extract

One row per calendar event:

• Event: name, Forex Factory ID and link, and one of ten event types (growth, inflation, employment, central bank…)
• Market: currency, country and ISO code, impact rating (high, medium, low, holiday)
• Figures: actual, forecast, previous and revised, as printed and as numbers (“175K” reads 175000), with the unit
• Surprise: actual minus forecast, and whether the print was better or worse for the currency
• Timing: date and time in your time zone, the release instant in UTC, all-day and tentative flags
• Indicator notes: source agency, what it measures, usual effect, frequency, Forex Factory’s notes; the speaker for speeches

The technical challenge

• Text, not numbers: “4.4B”, “2.4%” and a vote split like “0-3-6” share one column; most need parsing, some must stay text.
• Time zones: “today” in New York and in Tokyo are not the same day; a dataset needs one unambiguous instant plus local times.
• Moving rows: a release is scheduled days ahead, then filled in once the figure is out; a stable ID keeps reruns from duplicating it.
• Long histories: a month holds hundreds of events; ranges back to 2007 are read month by month.

DIY or a ready-made Actor?

Our ForexFactory Scraper on Apify takes a date range (this week, last month or a custom range back to 2007), event keywords such as CPI, NFP or rate decision, or Forex Factory links: calendar views, single events, or an indicator page for its whole release history. Filter by currency, impact and event type, in any time zone. No account or API key needed. Pay-per-result at about $0.0185 per calendar event.

A practical workflow

1. Pull the history: paste an indicator page, or run CPI over a custom range, for every release with its surprise.
2. Join on time: the UTC datetime field lines up with any market series you already hold; indicator-page rows carry the date only.
3. Schedule the present: run next week’s calendar every Sunday, then again a few minutes after the releases you follow; stable event IDs update rows in place. Our guide to building a data pipeline that doesn’t break covers scheduling and monitoring.
4. Share it: send the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack or a webhook, in your team’s time zone.

Use cases that pay off

• Macro research: every CPI print or payrolls report since 2007, actual next to forecast.
• Surprise analysis: how often and by how much actuals differed from forecasts, per indicator and currency.
• Event studies: release instants joined with your own price data, to see how markets behaved around each release.
• Team dashboards: the day’s high and medium impact events, in each desk’s time zone.

The legal boundaries

• Public data only: the scraper reads the calendar any visitor sees and bypasses no login, paywall or CAPTCHA.
• Informational, not advice: the figures are not investment advice; verify them with the publishing agency before regulated or trading use.
• Named officials: speech rows name public officials; handle that data under GDPR, CCPA or PIPL as relevant.
• Terms of service: Forex Factory’s terms apply; analyze the calendar rather than republishing it.