Methodology

What it measures

The Supply Chain Index is a single, standardized reading of supply-side pressure across the global economy — a gauge of whether the world's supply chains are running tighter or looser than normal. A high value means goods are moving with more friction than usual: longer delivery times, growing order backlogs, and elevated freight costs. A low value means the opposite — ample capacity and slack.

Crucially, the index is designed to isolate supply conditions from demand. A surge in orders because the economy is booming is not, by itself, "supply-chain pressure." The underlying methodology strips out those demand-driven movements so that what remains reflects constraints on the supply side.

The underlying data

The index tracks the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), a widely-cited barometer introduced by the New York Fed in 2022 and updated monthly. The GSCPI integrates transportation-cost data with manufacturing survey indicators to summarize global supply-chain conditions in one number.

We republish the GSCPI directly and compute a set of derived readings (period-over-period changes, historical percentile, records) on top of it. We do not alter the underlying values.

Components

The GSCPI draws on two families of inputs:

Global transportation costs

• Ocean shipping rates across major cross-border routes (Baltic Dry Index and Harpex-style container-cost measures).
• Air freight cost indices for outbound and inbound routes between the US, Asia, and Europe.

Manufacturing survey indicators (PMI)

The supply-chain-relevant sub-components of Purchasing Managers' Index surveys across major economies — the euro area, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the US:

• Delivery times — how long suppliers are taking to fulfil orders.
• Backlogs of orders — work that has been ordered but not yet completed.
• Purchased stocks / inventories — the buffer of inputs firms are holding.

How the index is constructed

The components are combined and expressed as a standard-deviation ("z-score") measure relative to their own history. That is why the numbers are typically small — roughly between −2 and +4:

• 0 means conditions are exactly at their long-run average.
• +1 means pressure is one standard deviation above average.
• −1 means pressure is one standard deviation below average (slack).

Because it is standardized, the index is unitless and directly comparable across time. The all-time high of roughly +4.4 occurred in December 2021, at the peak of post-pandemic disruption; readings below −1 indicate unusually loose conditions.

How to read the number

The headline reading is classified into plain-English bands. These thresholds are ours, applied on top of the raw GSCPI value to make the number legible at a glance:

The site's accent color follows these bands — red for stress, amber for normal, green for easing — so the overall state is readable without parsing the number.

Update schedule & pipeline

The GSCPI is published monthly by the New York Fed, typically in the first few business days of the month for the prior month. This site checks for new data automatically on a daily schedule; the figure shown is always the most recent monthly observation.

The refresh runs as a scheduled job that downloads the official data file, recomputes the derived statistics, and writes them to static JSON that the page reads. Each write is atomic, so the site never serves a partially-updated file. The "last updated" timestamp in the footer reflects the most recent successful refresh.

Source & attribution

All underlying data is sourced from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, which publishes the series for free. For background on the construction of the GSCPI, see the New York Fed's "A New Barometer of Global Supply Chain Pressures."

This site is an independent presentation of that public data. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.

Limitations & caveats

• Monthly, not real-time. The index moves once a month. It will not capture a disruption that begins and resolves within a few weeks.
• Revisions. The New York Fed revises the series as source inputs are updated, so recent values can change slightly after first publication.
• Global, not local. It summarizes worldwide conditions and will not reflect a bottleneck specific to one country, port, or industry.
• A gauge, not a forecast. The index describes current and past conditions; it does not predict where pressure is heading.
• Not investment advice. Nothing on this site is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.

Glossary

GSCPI — Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, the New York Fed series this site tracks.

PMI — Purchasing Managers' Index, a monthly survey of businesses whose sub-components (delivery times, backlogs, inventories) feed the index.

Z-score / standard deviation — a measure of how far a value sits from its historical average, in units of that history's own variability. It is what makes 0 "normal" and lets readings be compared across decades.

Demand-adjustment — the step that removes demand-driven movement from the transportation and survey data, leaving a cleaner read on supply-side constraints.