Federal Register Scraper

Extract Federal Register documents including federal regulations, executive orders, proposed rules, agency notices, and presidential documents. Search by keyword, agency, document type, date range, or significance. Returns structured data with titles, abstracts, PDF links, citations, and more.

Disclaimer: This actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Federal Register, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), or the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO).

How to Scrape Federal Register Documents

This actor wraps the free Federal Register API (federalregister.gov/api/v1) to extract government regulatory documents without needing proxies or authentication. Simply configure your search filters and the actor handles pagination, rate limiting, and data formatting automatically.

Supported document types include:

• Rules — final federal regulations published by government agencies
• Proposed Rules — regulations open for public comment before finalization
• Notices — agency announcements, meetings, and administrative actions
• Presidential Documents — executive orders, proclamations, memoranda, and determinations

Executive Orders Data

Track executive orders and presidential actions by setting the document type to "Presidential Document". You can filter further by date range to monitor new executive actions or build a historical dataset of presidential directives. Each result includes the executive order number, signing date, and full text links.

Federal Regulations and Compliance Monitoring

Set up scheduled runs to monitor new regulations from specific agencies. Filter by agency slug (e.g., environmental-protection-agency, securities-and-exchange-commission) and enable the "Significant Only" flag to focus on regulations with major economic impact exceeding $100 million annually.

Output Example

Each document in the output dataset contains:

{
    "title": "Improving Government Efficiency and Reducing the Federal Workforce",
    "type": "Presidential Document",
    "subtype": "Executive Order",
    "abstract": "By the authority vested in me as President...",
    "documentNumber": "2025-02489",
    "citation": "90 FR 10325",
    "publicationDate": "2025-02-04",
    "signingDate": "2025-01-20",
    "effectiveOn": "2025-01-20",
    "commentsCloseOn": null,
    "agencies": ["Executive Office of the President"],
    "agencySlugs": ["executive-office-of-the-president"],
    "htmlUrl": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/04/2025-02489/...",
    "pdfUrl": "https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-02-04/pdf/2025-02489.pdf",
    "startPage": 10325,
    "endPage": 10328,
    "pageLength": 4,
    "executiveOrderNumber": "14210",
    "significant": true,
    "topics": ["Government organization and employees"],
    "docketIds": [],
    "regulationIdNumbers": [],
    "cfrReferences": []
}

Use Cases for Federal Register Data

• Compliance teams — monitor new regulations affecting your industry before they take effect
• Policy analysts — track proposed rules and comment periods across federal agencies
• Legal professionals — research regulatory history, CFR references, and docket information
• Journalists and researchers — investigate executive orders, agency actions, and regulatory trends
• Government affairs teams — stay ahead of regulatory changes and prepare public comments
• AI/ML engineers — build datasets of regulatory text for natural language processing models

How Much Does It Cost to Scrape the Federal Register?

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing. You pay per document result returned.

• $0.00005 per actor start (Apify platform default)
• Per-result charge based on the number of documents extracted
• No proxy costs — the Federal Register API is free and public, no proxy needed

A typical search returns 50-200 documents at minimal cost. Set the maxResults parameter to control costs.

Tip: Start with maxResults of 50 to preview results, then increase as needed up to 10,000.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
searchTerm	string	Keyword search across all documents (e.g., "climate change", "tariff")
documentType	string[]	Filter by type: Rule, Proposed Rule, Notice, Presidential Document
agency	string	Agency name or slug (e.g., "environmental-protection-agency")
dateFrom	string	Start date (YYYY-MM-DD)
dateTo	string	End date (YYYY-MM-DD)
significantOnly	boolean	Only return significant regulations
maxResults	integer	Maximum documents to return (1-10000, default 100)

Integrations

Export your data as JSON, CSV, or Excel. Schedule runs to monitor new federal regulations automatically. Use webhooks to trigger downstream workflows when new rules or executive orders are published.

This actor works as an MCP server — AI agents can discover and use it to access Federal Register data programmatically.