Craigslist Scraper: listings by city, category and keyword, no API key

Give it a city, a category and something to search for. You get rows with the listing id, title, price, posted time, neighbourhood, coordinates, image links and the listing URL. Switch on full posting text and each row also carries the seller's body text and the attribute table.

Craigslist has no nationwide index. Every city is its own site, so one search covers one city. You can list several cities in one run, and each one is searched separately.

Input	A city, a category and a search term, or Craigslist search URLs
Output	One row per listing
Ceiling	50,000 listings per run
Account needed	None, and no API key
Price	$0.85 per 1,000 listings, flat on every plan

🔍 What Craigslist Scraper does

It runs the search Craigslist's own filter bar would run, and hands you the results as structured rows instead of a page you have to read. Price bounds, owner or dealer, photos only, titles only, posted today, and a postal code with a radius are all there.

City names are forgiving. newyork, new york city, sfbay and london all resolve, and 707 Craigslist sites across 79 countries are recognised. If you would rather not think about abbreviations at all, paste a Craigslist search URL into searchUrls and whatever filters are already in it are kept.

Rows are written at the end of the run rather than as they are found, so keep maxItems at a size the run can finish.

📥 What you give it

{
  "city": ["sfbay"],
  "query": "toyota tacoma",
  "category": "cta",
  "maxItems": 500,
  "maxPrice": 25000
}

Field	Default	What it is
city	none	The Craigslist site, as a subdomain like newyork or a plain name like new york city. Add several to cover several cities. The box starts with newyork in it, which is a suggestion and not a default.
query	none	What to search for. Leave it empty to take the whole category. The box starts with bike in it.
category	sss	The category abbreviation. Groups: sss all for sale, hhh housing, jjj jobs, ggg gigs, bbb services, ccc community, cta cars and trucks, eee events. Leaf codes work too: bia bicycles, apa apartments, fuo furniture, zip free stuff, ela electronics.
searchUrls	none	Paste Craigslist search URLs instead of filling in the fields above.
maxItems	100	Total listings across every search in the run, up to 50,000.
fetchDetails	false	Open each posting for the body text, the attribute table, the street address where one is shown and the last-updated time. Slower, roughly one extra request per listing.
sort	newest	newest or relevant. Relevance stops at 360 results, which is Craigslist's cap.
minPrice, maxPrice	none	Price bounds.
postalCode, radiusMiles	none	Search around a postal code rather than the whole city. Set both.
sellerType	any	owner or dealer, in the categories that have both.
hasImage	false	Skip postings with no photos.
titleOnly	false	Match your terms against titles only.
postedToday	false	Only today's postings.
proxyConfiguration	none	Optional. Leave it alone unless you need the run to go out through a particular network.

📤 What you get back

A real row, with the image list cut short:

{
  "listingId": "7959183765",
  "title": "Dutch Gazelle Tour Populair C8, 61CM, In storage, like NEW IMPORT",
  "price": 850,
  "priceText": "$850",
  "currency": "USD",
  "url": "https://www.craigslist.org/view/d/long-island-city-dutch-gazelle-tour/fRrdPyQukG7jW8afcTduEd",
  "postedAt": "2026-09-14T05:37:44.000Z",
  "categoryId": 68,
  "categoryAbbr": "bik",
  "categoryName": "bicycles - by owner",
  "location": "LIC",
  "neighborhood": null,
  "subarea": "que",
  "city": "newyork",
  "cityName": "new york city",
  "region": "NY",
  "country": "US",
  "latitude": 40.7446,
  "longitude": -73.9345,
  "images": ["https://images.craigslist.org/00L0L_2mdiEek2CdR_0dI07I_600x450.jpg", "..."],
  "imageCount": 9,
  "searchUrl": "https://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=bike",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T05:42:36.888Z"
}

Field	What it is
listingId	Stable. Use it as your dedupe key across runs.
price	A number, and null when the posting has no price. Jobs, gigs and most community posts have none. priceText keeps Craigslist's own formatting.
postedAt	A real timestamp, not a relative phrase.
location	Craigslist's free-text place label, filled in on effectively every row. neighborhood is a separate assigned field and is usually null.
latitude, longitude	Coordinates for the posting, which is what makes a map or a distance filter possible.
images	Image URLs at 600x450. imageCount is how many of those were built for the row.
searchUrl	Which of your searches produced this row, so a multi-city run is easy to split.

With Fetch full posting text on, five more fields land on the same row: description (the seller's body text), attributes (the labelled table, so condition and odometer on a car, rent period on a rental, frame size on a bike), attributeTags (the unlabelled chips like 1BR / 1Ba), updatedAt and address. A posting that disappeared between the search and the detail fetch keeps its search fields and gains a detailError.

🧾 Reading the output

Row	How to spot it	Charged
A listing	It has a listingId and no charged field	yes
The sample row	_sample: true and charged: false	no
A diagnostic	_diagnostic: true and an errorCode	no

charged: false is the marker on the rows that are not listings. A real listing row does not carry the field at all, so filter on _sample and _diagnostic being absent.

errorCode	What it means
BAD_INPUT	That city could not be resolved to a Craigslist site. Check the spelling, or use the subdomain.
BAD_SEARCH	Craigslist turned the search down, nearly always a category abbreviation that does not exist for that site.
NO_RESULTS	The search ran and matched nothing. Try a broader term, another category, or a bigger radius.
SEARCH_REJECTED	Craigslist answered with something that could not be read. Re-run it.
BLOCKED	The request did not get through. Try again in a few minutes.

Every diagnostic carries a hint in plain words, and one failed search never stops the others.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Craigslist Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Put your city into City and what you want into Search terms.
3. Set Category. sss covers everything for sale and is a fine starting point.
4. Set Maximum listings, then click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.85 per 1,000 listings. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per listing row. Turning on full posting text does not add a second charge, it just adds fields to the same row. The sample row is not charged, diagnostic rows are not charged, and a listing id seen twice in one run only becomes one row.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching a city and category on a schedule and diffing on listingId, so you see what went up since yesterday without reloading a page.
• Pulling every car under a price in one metro, with attributes on, so odometer and title status arrive as columns rather than as paragraphs.
• Rental research: hhh or apa with a postal code and a radius, then reading attributeTags for bedroom counts and square footage.
• Finding dealer postings hiding in an owner category, or the reverse, using sellerType.
• Mapping what is for sale where, because every row carries coordinates.

🚧 What it does not do

• One city per search. There is no nationwide Craigslist index. List several cities and each is searched on its own.
• Relevance sorting stops at 360 results. Craigslist's cap, not a setting here. newest has no such limit, which is why it is the default.
• No sorting by price. Craigslist no longer offers it. Sort the dataset yourself.
• No seller contact details. No phone number, no email, no reply-to address. Craigslist keeps those behind its own relay.
• neighborhood is usually null. Craigslist only assigns neighbourhoods in a few dense metros. location is the field to rely on.
• Cross-posts are separate rows. The same couch posted to three subareas is three postings with three ids, and Craigslist reports them separately.
• Rows land at the end of the run, so a run that hits its time limit writes nothing. Full posting text roughly doubles the work, so pick maxItems with that in mind.
• Postings expire and get deleted. scrapedAt records when the row was read.

🧭 Which listings scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Craigslist listings by city and category	This one
Classified listings across Russia and the CIS	Avito Listings Scraper
AliExpress search results with prices and order counts	AliExpress Products Scraper
Wholesale prices, minimum order quantities and suppliers	1688 Wholesale Scraper
Buyer reviews with photos for a shop	Shopee Shop Reviews Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Craigslist account? No. Nothing to log into and no key to apply for.

Can I search the whole country at once? No, and neither can Craigslist. Pass a list of cities instead.

Why did I only get 360 results? You used relevance sorting. Switch Sort to newest first.

Can I get the seller's phone or email? No. Craigslist hides them behind its own relay, so they are not on the page to read.

Is price missing a lot? In job, gig and community categories, yes, because those postings have no price. For-sale postings where the seller left it blank also come back null.

Can I schedule it? Yes. Keep listingId as your key and each run tells you what is new.

Is scraping Craigslist legal? These are public postings, and they can contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Check Craigslist's terms too. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the city, the category and the run ID. If you got a diagnostic row, its errorCode and hint usually name the problem on their own.