BLS Provider Extension for the OpenBB Platform

openbb-bls integrates the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics into the OpenBB Platform. It combines three data paths:

• BLS Public Data API v2 — point-in-time time series by series ID (the only endpoint that can use an API key).
• Published release files — News Release tables, supplemental XLSX files, and the news-release chart packages, parsed directly from bls.gov.
• A bundled series catalog — a local, partitioned cache of ~1.1M BLS series (14 survey families) so the catalog search works offline with no API calls.

A bundled OpenBB Workspace dashboard (apps.json) ships five apps: a BLS home app plus dedicated Employment Situation, CPI, PPI, and Productivity apps.

Installation

From PyPI:

pip install openbb-bls

For local development from a clone of the OpenBB monorepo, run from this folder:

pip install -e .

Authentication

No key is required. Every News-Release table, supplemental table, and chart endpoint is parsed from published files and works with no credentials.

An (optional) BLS registration key only affects the series endpoint, where it raises the per-request limits — 50 symbols / 20-year window / 500 requests per day (registered) vs. 25 / 10 years / 25 per day (unregistered). Get one at https://data.bls.gov/registrationEngine/ and set it as bls_api_key:

from openbb import obb

obb.user.credentials.bls_api_key = "YOUR_KEY"

Coverage

Python commands are obb.bls.<group>.<command>(...); the equivalent REST route is GET /api/v1/bls/<group>/<command>. Every group also exposes a documents command listing the release PDFs/files for that program.

Consumer Price Index — bls.cpi

Employment Situation — bls.employment_situation

Producer Price Index — bls.ppi

JOLTS — bls.jolts

Productivity & Costs — bls.productivity

Import / Export Price Indexes — bls.import_export

Real Earnings — bls.real_earnings

Search, Series & Calendar

These cross-survey commands fetch live or cached data by series ID:

When openbb-economy is installed these register under the Economy survey namespace (e.g. obb.economy.survey.bls_search(...), and the release calendar as obb.economy.calendar(provider="bls")); otherwise they are available standalone as obb.bls.search(...), obb.bls.series(...), and obb.bls.calendar(...).

Usage

from openbb import obb

# Latest CPI-U expenditure-category table (no key required)
obb.bls.cpi.t1_expenditure_category(provider="bls").to_df()

# A specific time series from the BLS Public Data API
obb.bls.series(symbol="CUUR0000SA0", provider="bls").to_df()

# Find series in the local catalog, then chart one
obb.bls.search(category="cpi", query="urban", provider="bls").to_df()

Documentation for the OpenBB Platform is available at https://docs.openbb.co/platform.