World Bank Open Data

What it is

World Bank Open Data is the institution's public statistics catalogue and the REST API in front of it. A GET against api.worldbank.org/v2/country/br/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?format=json returns Brazil's GDP series with no key and no account. The API is on version 2; version 1 was retired in November 2018 and its endpoints now answer "Resource not found".

What sits behind it is development statistics rather than market data — GDP, inflation, population, debt, trade, governance scores — compiled from national statistical offices, the IMF, the UN and the World Federation of Exchanges rather than measured by the World Bank itself. For a stock-market reader that makes it a denominator source: the macro series you divide a portfolio by, not anything you would trade on.

Pricing

Free without qualification. No key, no tier, no quota page, and no rate limit stated anywhere in the documentation. The bounds that exist are per-request rather than per-account: 50 rows a page by default, up to 32,500 with per_page (40,000 returns a server error), 60 indicators maximum in one query, a 4,000-character URL limit, and 15,000 data points per call on the SDMX endpoint.

The licence is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which is what makes this worth a card rather than a bookmark — you may put the numbers inside a commercial product if you credit the World Bank and its data providers. The exceptions are real: some third-party datasets carry the Open Database License, a microdata research licence, or terms set by whoever supplied them, and those cannot be redistributed on the same footing.

Data & coverage

The /v2/indicator endpoint lists 29,544 indicator codes across 71 databases. Most of that is archive. World Development Indicators, the database people mean, holds 1,498 of those codes, and the World Bank describes it as roughly 1,400 series for 217 economies with history back to 1960. It is refreshed quarterly — 27 January, 8 April and 1 July in 2026 — and every response carries the source's lastupdated stamp, which for WDI currently reads 2026-07-13.

Everything is annual — no intraday, no daily, and for the overwhelming majority of series no monthly either.

Integrations

Plain REST, and XML by default — format=json, jsonstat and jsonP are opt-in, which catches anyone who assumes otherwise. Bulk downloads are a separate route: ?downloadformat=csv or ?downloadformat=excel against an indicator returns a zipped CSV or an Excel workbook holding every economy and year at once, which is the sane way to take a whole series. There is an SDMX-ML 2.1 endpoint at /v2/sdmx/rest/ for pipelines that already speak SDMX.

The World Bank ships no client library. The three Python packages in common use are all third-party — wbgapi (MIT, Tim Herzog, published from a personal GitHub account), wbdata (GPL-2.0-or-later, Oliver Sherouse) and world_bank_data (Marc Wouts) — and none of them is named in the API documentation.

The institution also runs a second, newer platform, Data360, on its own host with its own API and an official MCP server. That is not this API, the indicator codes are not interchangeable without mapping, and no deprecation notice for the v2 Indicators API appears in its documentation.

Limitations

• Annual and lagged. In September 2026 the newest GDP figure for most economies is 2025, and it arrived in the July refresh. Anything needing a number faster than a year is the wrong use.
• The market series are half-covered. Market capitalization of listed domestic companies (CM.MKT.LCAP.CD) has ever carried a value for 103 of the 217 economies, and only 68 have one for 2025. Stocks traded and listed-company counts are the same shape. They come from the World Federation of Exchanges, so an economy without a WFE member exchange is simply absent.
• Survey-based series are worse. The Gini index has a value for 171 economies, but only 62 of them have one for 2023 or later, and just four for 2025. A country's latest inequality figure being five years old is normal, not an edge case.
• Whole databases are frozen and the API does not warn you. Doing Business last updated in August 2021, Enterprise Surveys in March 2022, Africa Development Indicators in February 2013. All three still answer queries as readily as WDI does.
• Figures are revised backwards without notice. Historical values are restated at each quarterly refresh, the errata page publishes the list of changes after the fact, and there is no versioned snapshot to pin to. A number cached last quarter may not be the number today, and nothing in the response tells you it moved.
• No prices, no tickers, no securities. This is not market data.

Alternatives

Nothing else in this catalogue does this job. Nasdaq Data Link used to carry free macro series and no longer does. The IMF and the OECD publish overlapping indicators on their own free APIs under different revision and licensing rules, and the three institutions' figures for the same country and year frequently disagree — compare on the specific indicator, not on the source. For anything priced, see the rest of the market data category.