🇨🇴 DANE Colombia Statistics Scraper

Pull Colombia's official statistics straight from DANE and get each indicator as a flat row with its number, its reference period and its unit. Pick a topic, such as labour market, prices, national accounts or international trade, and the Actor returns the published figures with the date DANE released them. No API key, no registration, no login.

DANE is Colombia's national statistics office. It publishes the country's inflation, unemployment, GDP, trade and poverty figures, and it publishes them the way a ministry does: as a Spanish sentence inside a web page, with the tables locked in a PDF bulletin and a stack of Excel annexes beside it. There is no public API and nothing on the page exports. This Actor reads the topic's statistical operations, lifts the indicator name, the figure, the unit and the reference period out of what DANE actually published, checks when the matching bulletin file went live, and writes it all into a dataset you can open in a spreadsheet.

Who uses it	What they use DANE for
🏢 Buyers of Colombian businesses	Checking a seller's growth story against the sector's real numbers before signing
📈 Deal teams and analysts	Building the macro page of a model: inflation, wage pressure, unemployment, GDP
💵 Lenders and valuation teams	Indexing prices and construction costs to the official series rather than an estimate
🌎 Market researchers and journalists	Tracking Colombian indicators over time without opening twenty PDF bulletins

📋 What it does

💡 Why it matters: a Colombian target's numbers only mean something next to the country's. If a company grew revenue 5% in a year when the IPC rose 6.24%, it shrank.

• 🗂 Covers twelve DANE topics. Labour market, prices and costs, national accounts, international trade, industry, construction, agriculture, demography, poverty, education, health, security.
• 🔢 Returns the figure as a number, parsed out of Colombian notation, so 0,39% arrives as 0.39 and US$4.690,7 millones arrives as 4690.7.
• 📅 Keeps the reference period with the figure. A July 2026 unemployment rate is labelled July 2026, not the day you ran it.
• 📆 Records the release date. Taken from the timestamp on the technical bulletin DANE published for that operation.
• 🏛 Names the statistical operation. Every row says which DANE survey or index it came from, such as the Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares.
• 💾 Exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, from the run page or the API.

📊 Output

Every indicator is one flat row. Indicator names are in Spanish, as DANE publishes them. N/A means DANE states no value for that field on the page the figure came from.

Field	Type	Description
📊 indicator	string	Indicator name as DANE writes it, for example tasa global de participación
🔢 value	number	The published figure, parsed to a number
📅 period	string	Reference period the figure belongs to, for example julio de 2026
🗂 category	string	Topic slug you asked for, for example mercado-laboral
📐 unit	string	Unit of the figure, for example %, percentage points, USD million, years
🏛 source	string	The DANE statistical operation the figure came from
📆 release_date	string	ISO timestamp of the bulletin file DANE published for that operation
🔗 url	string	The DANE page the figure was read from
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection
⚠️ error	string	null on a normal row

Example rows

{
  "indicator": "tasa global de participación",
  "value": 64.8,
  "period": "julio de 2026",
  "category": "mercado-laboral",
  "unit": "%",
  "source": "Gran encuesta integrada de hogares (GEIH) Mercado laboral - Empleo y desempleo",
  "release_date": "2026-08-31T14:38:10.000Z",
  "url": "https://www.dane.gov.co/index.php/estadisticas-por-tema/mercado-laboral/empleo-y-desempleo",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-22T19:10:06.365Z",
  "error": null
}

{
  "indicator": "déficit en la balanza comercial colombiana",
  "value": 2797.8,
  "period": "julio de 2026",
  "category": "comercio-internacional",
  "unit": "USD million",
  "source": "Balanza comercial",
  "release_date": "2026-09-21T14:54:21.000Z",
  "url": "https://www.dane.gov.co/index.php/estadisticas-por-tema/comercio-internacional/balanza-comercial",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-22T19:10:21.071Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

	What you get
The official source	Figures come from dane.gov.co, the statistics office itself, not from a news summary or a data reseller.
A number, not a sentence	DANE writes its results as Spanish prose. You get a numeric value with a unit beside it.
Period and release date	Each figure carries the period it measures and the date DANE put the bulletin out, so you can tell fresh from stale.
No credentials	DANE publishes openly. No API key, no account, no request quota to negotiate.
You pay per row	No subscription. A topic that publishes nothing new costs nothing.

🚀 How to use it

1. Create a free Apify account. New accounts start with $5 of credit.
2. Open the Actor and select Try for free.
3. Pick a topic in category. Labour market is the default.
4. Set maxItems to cap the run.
5. Select Start, then export from the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.

A first run:

{
  "category": "mercado-laboral",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Inflation and cost indices:

{
  "category": "precios-y-costos",
  "maxItems": 50
}

⚙️ Input

Field	Required	Description
category	No	DANE topic slug. One of mercado-laboral, precios-y-costos, cuentas-nacionales, comercio-internacional, industria, construccion, agropecuario, demografia-y-poblacion, pobreza-y-condiciones-de-vida, educacion, salud, seguridad-y-defensa
maxItems	No	Maximum rows to collect in a run, from 1 to 1,000,000

💰 Pricing

Pay per result. No subscription, and no Apify platform usage on top.

Apify plan	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
Per indicator row	$0.0085	$0.00817	$0.00783	$0.0075	$0.0075	$0.0075

Rows collected	Cost on the Free plan
100	$0.85
1,000	$8.50
10,000	$85.00

Free plan runs return up to 10 rows as a preview. Any paid Apify plan lifts that to 1,000,000 per run.

🔌 Integrate with any app

The dataset is available through the Apify API as soon as the run finishes. Use run-sync-get-dataset-items for a one-shot call, webhooks to trigger what happens next, or the Make, Zapier, Airbyte and LangChain integrations listed on the Actor page.

🤖 Use with an AI agent

Give an agent live access to Colombian statistics over the Model Context Protocol:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=acquistion-automation/dane-colombia-statistics-scraper"

Then ask it in plain language for Colombia's latest inflation or unemployment figure and read the result back.

❓ Frequently asked questions

Why are the indicator names in Spanish? Because that is how DANE publishes them. Translating them would put a name on the row that does not appear in the source, and you would lose the ability to match a figure back to the bulletin it came from.

How many rows does a topic return? It depends on how much DANE has published for it. Labour market and national accounts run to a few dozen figures. Security and defence, which DANE updates once a year, returns a handful. Set maxItems high and take what the topic has.

Is this the full historical series? No. It returns the figures DANE currently states on its topic pages, which are the latest results and the comparisons it draws against earlier periods. Full series live in the Excel annexes linked from each page, and the row's url takes you there.

Why is period sometimes N/A? Some DANE sentences state a figure without repeating the period. When nothing on the page ties the figure to a date, the Actor says so instead of guessing.

What does release_date mean? It is when DANE published the technical bulletin for that statistical operation, read from the file itself. It is not the date you ran the Actor, and it is usually later than the period the figure measures.

Do I need a proxy? No. Requests, retries and a Colombian residential fallback are handled inside the Actor and included in the price.

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About Acquisition Automation Co.

We build automation for people buying businesses. The repetitive part of an acquisition search, checking listings, pulling public records, tracking owners and assets, is work a machine should do, so the buyer's time goes into judging deals instead of collecting them.

We add new Actors regularly. If there is a source you need and do not see here, tell us.

🆘 Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab of this Actor with your run ID, the input you used, and what you expected to get back.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística or any government agency. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using that data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable law.