Market Data

The Dallas Fed Survey at 1.30: Where Manufacturing and the Oil Patch Meet

Every regional Fed survey has a personality shaped by its district. The Dallas survey carries the oil patch inside it, which makes it a distinct read for anyone whose demand tracks energy.

The regional Fed manufacturing surveys each reflect the economy of their district, and the Dallas Fed survey, covering Texas, carries a heavy energy weighting that the New York or Philadelphia surveys do not. It reads 1.30 index (Jul 1, 2026), with no prior-year reading archived yet. For a manufacturer whose demand is tied to oil and gas activity, drilling equipment, oilfield services, pipe, pumps, and the broad industrial supply chain around energy, the Dallas survey is a more relevant regional gauge than the national composite, because it moves with the sector that drives their order book.

Why the energy tilt matters

When oil prices move, drilling and completion activity follows, and that pulls demand for a wide range of manufactured goods across the Texas industrial base. WTI crude, at $81.96/bbl (Aug 3, 2026), with no prior-year reading archived yet, is the price that sets that activity in motion. So the Dallas survey blends general manufacturing sentiment with an energy-cycle signal, and reading it against WTI helps separate the two: a Dallas reading diverging from the national composite often reflects the energy story specifically, which is exactly the signal an oilfield-adjacent manufacturer wants isolated.

Every regional survey has an accent. The Dallas survey speaks oil, which makes it the right gauge for anyone whose backlog rises and falls with the rig count.

Using it well

The disciplined use is to match the survey to your exposure. A manufacturer selling into energy should weight the Dallas survey more heavily than the national composite and read it alongside the crude benchmark, because together they anticipate the energy-driven portion of demand. A manufacturer with no energy exposure should treat Dallas as one district among several and lean on the composite instead. As with all the surveys, it is a diffusion index that captures direction better than magnitude and can whipsaw at turns, so it earns its place as an early directional read, confirmed later by hard orders data.

Track the Dallas survey alongside the other regional Fed surveys and the crude benchmark on the live data pages. See the regional picture

Published 2026-08-06.