Monetary Policy Report forecast data

Downloads the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Report (MPR) and parses headline projections from the Projections Databank workbook. Returns a long-format data frame where each row is one (publication date, forecast horizon, series) triple.

Usage

boe_mpr_forecasts(
  series = c("cpi_inflation", "gdp_growth", "gdp_level", "unemployment", "bank_rate"),
  month = NULL,
  year = NULL,
  cache = TRUE
)

Source

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy

Arguments

series: Character vector. One or more of: "cpi_inflation", "gdp_growth", "gdp_level", "unemployment", "bank_rate". Defaults to all five.
month: Character. "february", "may", "august", or "november". If NULL, the most recent quarterly release is used.
year: Integer. MPR year, 2019 or later. If NULL, the most recent quarterly release is used.
cache: Logical. Use cached download if available (default TRUE). Older releases never change so the cache never expires; the latest release is refreshed if older than 24 hours.

Value

A boe_tbl data frame with columns:

date: Date. Publication date of the MPR (start of quarter the report covers).
horizon: Character. Forecast horizon label (e.g. "2026 Q1").
horizon_date: Date. Start of the forecast quarter.
series: Character. Series identifier (e.g. "cpi_inflation").
value: Numeric. Forecast value (percent for rates and growth; index for gdp_level).

Details

Coverage runs quarterly from November 2019 (when the report was renamed from Inflation Report) to the latest published release.

Requires the readxl package. The MPR is published as a zip archive containing a Projections Databank workbook plus chart data and slides; this function only reads the projection sheets.

Each row of a projection sheet is one MPR publication; columns are forecast quarters. The same publication therefore contributes multiple rows here, one per forecast horizon.

Older releases

Pre-2025 MPRs are packaged differently and do not contain a single "Projections Databank" workbook. This function targets the post-2025 format and may error on older releases.

Examples

# \donttest{
if (requireNamespace("readxl", quietly = TRUE)) {
  op <- options(boe.cache_dir = tempdir())

  # Latest CPI inflation projections
  cpi <- boe_mpr_forecasts(series = "cpi_inflation")
  head(cpi)

  options(op)
}
#> ℹ Downloading February 2026 MPR archive
#> ✔ Downloading February 2026 MPR archive [301ms]
#> 
# }