Current Release PDF ASCIIRSSData Download FRED

Industrial production (IP) decreased 0.3 percent in March but increased at an annual rate of 5.5 percent in the first quarter. The March decline was led by a 5.8 percent drop in the index for utilities, as temperatures were warmer than is typical for the month. In contrast, the indexes for manufacturing and mining grew 0.3 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. At 103.9 percent of its 2017 average, total IP in March was 1.3 percent above its year-earlier level. Capacity utilization stepped down to 77.8 percent, a rate that is 1.8 percentage points below its long-run (1972–2024) average.

Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization: Summary

Market Groups

The major market groups posted mixed results in March. Among consumer goods, the production of durables increased 0.5 percent, while the index for nondurables decreased 1.4 percent, held down by a 5.9 percent drop in nondurable energy goods. The output of business equipment climbed 1.7 percent in March, boosted by a 4.5 percent jump in the output of transit equipment. Business supplies posted no change, while the index of construction supplies increased 0.6 percent. The production of non-energy materials rose 0.3 percent, while the output of energy materials fell 1.7 percent. The increase in non-energy materials was driven by a 0.5 percent increase in the durable non-energy component; the nondurable non-energy materials component was flat.

Industry Groups

Manufacturing output rose 0.3 percent in March. For the first quarter, factory output expanded 5.1 percent at an annual rate. In March, the production of durable goods increased 0.6 percent. The growth of durable goods output was led by the indexes for motor vehicles and parts and for aerospace and miscellaneous transportation equipment, which rose 1.2 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, but gains were seen in most categories of durable manufacturing. The production of nondurable goods was little changed in March, as gains in the indexes of food, of apparel and leather, of chemicals, and of plastics and rubber products offset declines in the indexes of textile and product mills, of paper, of printing and support, and of petroleum and coal products. The index for other manufacturing (publishing and logging) increased 0.5 percent in March.

Mining output grew 0.6 percent in March but was little changed in the first quarter as a whole. In March, the index for utilities decreased 5.8 percent, as the output for electric utilities fell 5.1 percent and the output for natural gas utilities plummeted 11.1 percent. Despite these declines, utilities posted a 16.2 percent gain at an annual rate in the first quarter.

Capacity utilization for manufacturing edged up 0.2 percentage point in March to 77.3 percent, a rate that is 0.9 percentage point below its long-run (1972–2024) average. The operating rate for mining rose 0.5 percentage point to 90.6 percent, and the operating rate for utilities moved down 4.4 percentage points to 69.1 percent. The rate for mining was 4.1 percentage points above its long-run average, while the rate for utilities remained substantially below its long-run average.

Revision of Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization

The Federal Reserve Board tentatively plans to issue its annual revision to the indexes of industrial production (IP) and the related measures of capacity utilization in the fourth quarter of 2025. Series will be newly benchmarked using information from the 2022 Economic Census. The weights for market-group splits of the industry-level indexes will be updated with information from the 2017 benchmark input-output accounts from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Other annual data, including information on the mining of metallic and nonmetallic minerals (except fuels), will be incorporated. The updated IP indexes will include revisions to the monthly indicator (either product data or input data) and to seasonal factors for each industry. In addition, the estimation methods for some series may be changed. Any modifications to the methods for estimating the output of an industry will affect the index from 1972 to the present.

Capacity and capacity utilization will be revised to incorporate data for manufacturing through the fourth quarter of 2024 from the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization, along with new data on capacity from the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Department of Energy, and other organizations.

Note. The statistics in this release cover output, capacity, and capacity utilization in the U.S. industrial sector, which is defined by the Federal Reserve to comprise manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities. Mining is defined as all industries in sector 21 of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS); electric and gas utilities are those in NAICS sectors 2211 and 2212. Manufacturing comprises NAICS manufacturing industries (sector 31-33) plus the logging industry and the newspaper, periodical, book, and directory publishing industries. Logging and publishing are classified elsewhere in NAICS (under agriculture and information, respectively), but historically they were considered to be manufacturing and were included in the industrial sector under the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. In December 2002 the Federal Reserve reclassified all its industrial output data from the SIC system to NAICS.

G.17 Release Tables:

• Summary: Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization
• Chart 1: Industrial Production, Capacity, and Capacity Utilization
• Chart 2: Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization
• Chart 3: Industrial Production of Selected Industries
• Table 1: Industrial Production: Market and Industry Groups (percent change)
• Table 2: Industrial Production: Special Aggregates and Selected Detail (percent change)
• Table 3: Motor Vehicle Assemblies
• Table 4: Industrial Production Indexes: Market and Industry Group Summary
• Table 5: Industrial Production Indexes: Special Aggregates
• Table 6: Diffusion Indexes of Industrial Production
• Table 7: Capacity Utilization: Manufacturing, Mining, and Utilities
• Table 8: Industrial Capacity: Manufacturing, Mining, and Utilities (percent change)
• Table 9: Industrial Production: Gross Value of Products and Nonindustrial Supplies
• Table 10: Gross-Value-Weighted Industrial Production: Stage-of-Process Groups
• Table 11: Historical Statistics for IP, Capacity, and Utilization: Total Industry
• Table 12: Historical Statistics for IP, Capacity, and Utilization: Manufacturing
• Table 13: Historical Statistics for IP, Capacity, and Utilization: Total Industry excluding Selected High-Technology Industries
• Table 14: Historical Statistics for IP, Capacity, and Utilization: Manufacturing excluding Selected High-Technology Industries
• Table 15: Industrial Production: Reliability Estimates

 Back to Top