GSA Per Diem Rates Scraper — Federal Travel Lodging & Meals

Extract official U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) per diem rates for federal travel reimbursement: maximum monthly lodging rates and meals & incidental expenses (M&IE) for every CONUS city, county, and state. Powers expense-management policies, T&E benchmarking, and government contractor billing.

GSA publishes per diem rates that the federal government and many private employers use as the standard reimbursement ceiling for business travel. Rates vary by month and location (e.g. Washington DC peaks in March–June and September–November; resort towns spike in tourist season). This scraper turns the official GSA API into structured rows you can plug straight into a finance system, BI tool, or CRM.

What you get

Each output row is one (city/county, state) destination with all twelve monthly lodging rates and the daily meals & incidental rate. Pre-computed fields (lodgingMin, lodgingMax, lodgingAvg, lodgingSeasonality) make it trivial to rank locations by cost and seasonality.

Field	Description
fiscalYear	U.S. federal fiscal year (Oct 1 of prior year through Sep 30)
state	USPS state code
city	Per diem destination city (or "Standard Rate")
county	County name when applicable
destinationId	GSA destination identifier (DID)
isStandardRate	true if this is the state-wide standard-rate fallback
lodgingMin / lodgingMax / lodgingAvg	Min / max / average monthly lodging rate (USD)
lodgingSeasonality	Max minus min — useful for ranking peak-season cities
mealsRate	Daily meals & incidental rate (USD)
lodgingJan … lodgingDec	Month-by-month maximum lodging rate (USD)

How to scrape GSA per diem rates

1. Click Try for free to start a run with the default fiscal year (FY24).
2. Optionally narrow with stateFilter, cityFilter, minLodgingRate.
3. Run — results land in the dataset as JSON / CSV / Excel / Markdown.

For higher volume, sign up for a free api.data.gov key and pass it in the apiKey field; otherwise the actor uses DEMO_KEY (rate-limited to ~30 requests/hour).

Pricing

$0.003 per result. A full FY24 CONUS pull (~400 destinations) costs less than $1.50 in result fees plus minimal compute. Apify compute is billed separately.

Example input

{
    "fiscalYear": 2024,
    "stateFilter": "CA",
    "minLodgingRate": 200,
    "maxResults": 0
}

Example output

{
    "fiscalYear": 2024,
    "state": "CA",
    "city": "San Francisco",
    "county": "San Francisco",
    "destinationId": "65",
    "isStandardRate": false,
    "lodgingMin": 263,
    "lodgingMax": 391,
    "lodgingAvg": 314.5,
    "lodgingSeasonality": 128,
    "mealsRate": 92,
    "lodgingJan": 263,
    "lodgingFeb": 263,
    "lodgingMar": 391,
    "lodgingApr": 391
}

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FAQ

Q: Why doesn't it cover OCONUS / foreign rates? A: GSA only publishes CONUS (continental U.S.) rates. OCONUS and foreign rates come from the Department of Defense and State Department respectively — different APIs.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: GSA publishes new fiscal-year rates each August/September. The actor pulls live from api.gsa.gov, so any in-year rate change appears immediately.

Q: Why does my output sometimes say "Standard Rate" with a null city? A: Each state has a fallback "Standard Rate" applied to non-listed counties. Filter with isStandardRate=false if you only want named cities.

Legal

Data is sourced from the public U.S. General Services Administration per diem API. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by GSA. For questions about the underlying rates, contact GSA at https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates. This actor is offered for compliance, finance, and benchmarking research; you are responsible for use that complies with applicable laws.