Authentication

Getting an API key

To get an API key, please sign up for a free Quandl account.

You can find your API key on your account settings page.

Authenticating your requests

You must include your API key with every request you make.

Append your API key to your requests using the api key parameter: api_key=YOURAPIKEY

Free and premium data

Quandl has a vast collection of free and open data collected from a variety of organizations: central banks, governments, multinational organizations and more. You can use it without payment and with few restrictions.

Some data on Quandl is premium and can only be accessed with a subscription. Subscriptions are a la carte: You can subscribe to the individual premium datasets you need and nothing more. Subscriptions can be canceled at any time.

All premium datasets benefit from Quandl’s free data-usage features: full API access, integration with our many libraries and tools, downloads in any format, multiple export and visualization options, and more. Most premium datasets come with extensive free samples.

While free data is suitable for experimentation and exploration, we strongly recommend using premium data for professional applications.

Rate limits

Authenticated users have a limit of 300 calls per 10 seconds, 2,000 calls per 10 minutes and a limit of 50,000 calls per day.

Authenticated users of free datasets have a concurrency limit of one; that is, they can make one call at a time and have an additional call in the queue.

Premium data subscribers have a limit of 5,000 calls per 10 minutes and a limit of 720,000 calls per day.