Federal Register API

Federal Register API for compliance, policy and government affairs teams: search rules, proposed rules, notices and presidential documents by keyword, agency, type and date, and get one clean row per document. $1 per 1,000 documents.

Cost: $0.001 per document ($1 per 1,000). Searches with no results, invalid searches and API errors are free. No login or API key.

What does Federal Register API do?

It reads the official federalregister.gov API, which is published by the Office of the Federal Register. Each row is one document with its title, type, agencies, publication date, effective date, comment deadline, citation, page range, links, docket IDs, Regulation Identifier Numbers (RIN) and the CFR parts it touches. Rows hold no names of individual people.

There are four modes:

• Search documents: keyword, agency, document type, publication date range, and a "significant only" filter.
• Documents by number: paste document numbers or document links and get the matching rows.
• Public inspection (upcoming): documents that agencies have filed and that are due to be published soon.
• New since last run (monitor): returns only documents it has not returned before. Schedule it daily and use the output as an alert feed.

Typical uses: track new proposed rules with open comment periods for an agency, watch a topic such as "artificial intelligence" or "tariff", build a dataset of final rules for a CFR title, or feed new documents into your own alerts.

Try it now. The form opens with final rules from the last 7 days (25 documents). Click Start. It takes a few seconds and costs under 3 cents.

How to use Federal Register API

1. Pick What to get.
2. For a search, add Keywords, Agencies (one slug per line, such as environmental-protection-agency), Document types, and the Published from and Published until dates.
3. For lookups, add Document numbers such as 2026-20888.
4. Set Maximum documents and click Start. Open the Documents or Comment deadlines table.

To find an agency slug, open the agency page on federalregister.gov. The slug is the last part of the page address.

Monitor mode

Give each monitor its own Monitor name under Advanced options. The Actor saves what it returned in a key-value store named federal-register-monitor in your account. The first run looks back 7 days (or from Published from). Later runs start from the last document they saw. The oldest new documents come first, so a low Maximum documents cuts nothing: the rest come in the next run. A run with nothing new gives one free no_results row.

How much does it cost?

Event	Price
Document (document)	$0.001 ($1 per 1,000)
Search with no results, invalid search or API error	Free

Apify adds only its small standard fee per run start. You can set a spending limit on any run, and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Example: on 13 October 2026 the API showed 59 final rules published in the last 7 days. A run for them gives 59 documents and costs 59 x $0.001 = $0.059. A run for 1,000 documents costs $1.00.

Input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "documentTypes": ["RULE"],
  "dateFrom": "7 days",
  "maxResults": 25
}

Search by agency and keyword, significant rules only:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchTerm": "emissions",
  "agencies": ["environmental-protection-agency"],
  "documentTypes": ["RULE", "PRORULE"],
  "significantOnly": true,
  "dateFrom": "2026-06-01",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Output

One row per document. This is a real row from a run on 13 October 2026 (abstract shortened here):

{
  "mode": "by_number",
  "document_number": "2026-20888",
  "title": "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets",
  "type": "Proposed Rule",
  "abstract": "The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (\"Commission\" or \"CFTC\") is issuing an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking regarding section 2(c)(2)(D) of the Commodity Exchange Act ...",
  "agencies": ["Commodity Futures Trading Commission"],
  "publication_date": "2026-10-13",
  "effective_on": null,
  "comments_close_on": "2026-12-14",
  "citation": "91 FR 64811",
  "start_page": 64811,
  "end_page": 64840,
  "html_url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/13/2026-20888/regulation-crypto-asset-transactions-and-regulation-crypto-asset-markets",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-10-13/pdf/2026-20888.pdf",
  "docket_ids": [],
  "regulation_id_numbers": ["3038-AF80"],
  "cfr_references": ["17 CFR 1", "17 CFR 38", "17 CFR 39"],
  "significant": null,
  "action": "Advanced notice of proposed rulemaking.",
  "status": "ok",
  "charged": true,
  "source": "Federal Register (federalregister.gov), U.S. Government"
}

status is ok for documents, which are charged. Free rows have a different status: no_results, not_found (a document number that does not exist), invalid_input, invalid_query (for example an unknown agency slug), access_blocked, rate_limited or api_error. The error field says why. Public inspection rows also fill filed_at, filing_type and public_inspection_pages; they have no abstract, citation or CFR references yet.

Related Actors

These Actors are built by the same author. Each answers one kind of question from an official public source, so an AI agent or a workflow can pick the right one by the question. All return one clean row per record, a source field naming the original publisher, and free rows for errors and empty results.

Question	Actor
Which drugs, devices or foods were recalled, and what adverse events were reported?	FDA Recalls & Drug Adverse Events
Who won a US federal contract or grant?	USAspending Awards API
Which public tenders are open in the EU and the UK?	Public Tenders API
What is the US national debt, a Treasury interest rate or an auction result?	Treasury Fiscal Data API
What is the official ECB exchange rate for a date?	Exchange Rates API
What did a public company file with the SEC, and what are its financials?	SEC EDGAR Filings API, SEC Company Financials API
Which startups raised money (SEC Form D)?	Startup Funding Rounds Tracker
Who is this company in an official register, and who owns it?	Company Registry Search, GLEIF Ownership Change Monitor
Is this company hiring, and for which roles?	Career Page Jobs Scraper
Which open access journals and articles cover a topic?	DOAJ API
What are the citation details of a paper or DOI?	Crossref Works Search
Which new preprints match a topic?	Preprint Papers API

FAQ

Is it legal to reuse this data? The Federal Register is a work of the U.S. Government. Works of the U.S. Government are not protected by copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. 105). The developer pages on federalregister.gov say that no API key is needed and ask republishers not to use the official NARA or OFR logos or seals. This Actor uses neither. This is not legal advice.

Is this the official legal text? No. federalregister.gov says it is not an official legal edition of the Federal Register. For legal research, check the official edition (PDF on govinfo.gov). The pdf_url field links to it.

Is it affiliated with the government? No. This is an unofficial Actor, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Office of the Federal Register, the National Archives or the U.S. Government Publishing Office. I built it and run it.

How many documents can one search return? The API returns up to 10,000 documents for one search. For more, split the search into date ranges.

How fast is it? About 1,000 documents per page request. The Actor sends one request at a time with a pause of at least half a second, and it slows down if the site asks it to. Some requests get a temporary block from the site's firewall. The Actor waits and retries, and if the block stays it ends the run with a free access_blocked row.

Why is significant empty? The Federal Register only gives this value for some rules and proposed rules. Use Significant rules only to keep the ones marked significant under Executive Order 12866.

How current is the data? Documents appear on the day they are published. Public inspection documents appear when agencies file them, usually a day or more before publication.