NBER Recession Indicator in United States

A monthly binary indicator for the United States: it takes the value 1 when the economy is in recession as dated by the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee (from the month after a peak until the trough) and 0 during expansions. It runs back to 1854 and is the series used to shade recessions on charts.

The NBER dates cyclical peaks and troughs using a broad set of measures (employment, real income, industrial production and sales), rather than the popular rule of two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. FRED turns those dates into the binary USREC series.

Chiefly an internal charting tool: it lets recession periods be shaded over any US series to provide historical context, though it is not a real-time market data release.

NBER announcements come with a lag of many months, since recessions are confirmed after the fact; the most recent part of the series can be revised once the committee dates a new peak or trough.