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Progress reporting allows MCP tools to notify clients about the progress of long-running operations. Clients can display progress indicators and provide better user experience during time-consuming tasks.

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Basic Usage

Use ctx.report_progress() to send progress updates to the client. The method accepts a progress value representing how much work is complete, and an optional total representing the full scope of work. 
from fastmcp import FastMCP, Context
import asyncio

mcp = FastMCP("ProgressDemo")

@mcp.tool
async def process_items(items: list[str], ctx: Context) -> dict:
    """Process a list of items with progress updates."""
    total = len(items)
    results = []

    for i, item in enumerate(items):
        await ctx.report_progress(progress=i, total=total)
        await asyncio.sleep(0.1)
        results.append(item.upper())

    await ctx.report_progress(progress=total, total=total)
    return {"processed": len(results), "results": results}

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Progress Patterns

PatternDescriptionExample
PercentageProgress as 0-100 percentageprogress=75, total=100
AbsoluteCompleted items of a known countprogress=3, total=10
IndeterminateProgress without known endpointprogress=files_found (no total)
For multi-stage operations, map each stage to a portion of the total progress range. A four-stage operation might allocate 0-25% to validation, 25-60% to export, 60-80% to transform, and 80-100% to import.

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Client Requirements

Progress reporting requires clients to support progress handling. Clients must send a progressToken in the initial request to receive progress updates. If no progress token is provided, progress calls have no effect (they don’t error). See Client Progress for details on implementing client-side progress handling.