Free Public Datasets

Which source for which question

Start with who collects the numbers. National statistics offices and central banks publish the original series, international bodies harmonize them across countries, and science agencies publish measurements. A ready-made chart site is the quickest way to see a trend, but the original publisher is the source you cite.

To find datasets outside this list, Google's Dataset Search is a search engine for datasets hosted in repositories across the web. It does not host the files, so the license is always the one on the publisher's page.

Check the license and the citation

Free to download does not always mean free to reuse for anything. Read the terms on the publisher's page before you publish a chart or build a product on the data:

• Public domain or no restrictions. Data.gov says most federal data is offered free and without restriction, but non-federal data in the catalog may have different licensing. BLS material is in the public domain, and BLS asks that you cite it as the source.
• CC BY. The World Bank licenses datasets under CC BY 4.0 by default, Eurostat's editorial content is CC BY 4.0 and Our World in Data puts its own charts and data under CC BY. CC BY lets you reuse and change the data as long as you give credit and say what you changed; our Creative Commons guide explains the attribution parts.
• Per-dataset or per-series rules. The World Bank labels other licenses on each dataset, and its Microdata Research License limits use to research. FRED series with a copyright notice belong to third parties, and most commercial use needs the St. Louis Fed's written consent. Our World in Data says most of its data comes from third parties whose licenses apply.

Citations are part of the terms too. UNdata asks to be cited as the reference, Eurostat asks for the dataset's DOI and access date, NASA strongly urges users to cite the data, and an app built on the Census Data API should show the notice that it is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.

File formats and API limits

Most portals offer CSV for spreadsheets and JSON for code. Our JSON vs YAML vs CSV guide explains the difference. If an API returns JSON and you want a table, the JSON to CSV converter flattens it; the CSV to JSON converter goes the other way, and the CSV to Excel converter gives you a workbook.

The free APIs have limits you should plan for:

• The Census Data API needs a key with all data queries and takes up to 50 variables in a single query; responses come as JSON or CSV.
• BLS allows 25 queries a day with 25 series and 10 years per query without registration, and 500 queries, 50 series and 20 years with a registration key that must be renewed once a year.
• NOAA's Climate Data Online web services need a token, limited to five requests per second and 10,000 requests per day.
• FRED says all web service requests require an API key, and you need a FRED account to see it.
• Eurostat's API returns SDMX-ML, SDMX-CSV, JSON-stat and TSV, and its datasets are updated twice a day.

Clean the file and make a chart

Downloads from statistics portals often carry footnote rows, empty columns, flags next to numbers and duplicate header lines. Open the file in the CSV cleaner first to trim spaces, drop empty rows and columns and remove duplicates, then check that every number column really holds numbers. Keep the original download untouched next to the cleaned copy, so you can show where each value came from.

For a quick look at the spread of a column, paste it into the standard deviation calculator. To publish the result, the chart maker turns a table into a bar, line, area or pie chart in your browser, and our list of free chart makers covers bigger projects. Put the source and the access date under the chart, the same way the publishers above ask you to cite them.

Checked and written by Tobias. Updated October 26, 2026.

Frequently asked questions