New Business License Feed: Fresh Openings by City

New business license leads from official city registers: every business, food, liquor and trade license newly issued in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and New Orleans. Filter to the trades you sell to, schedule it weekly, and each run returns only the openings you have not already been sent.

A newly issued license is about the highest intent signal a local sales team can get. Somebody just committed money and now needs a point of sale, an insurance policy, a sign, a linen contract, a payroll provider. That signal decays in days, which is why this is a feed and not an export.

Two things that break every other new-business feed

Future-dated licenses. Every one of these registers contains licenses dated years ahead. Chicago holds rows starting in 2028, Seattle in 2029. So the obvious query for a "newest licenses" feed, sort by start date descending, does not return new businesses at all: it returns the same handful of pre-dated records every single run. The window here is bounded at both ends, so what you get is genuinely new.

Three different date formats. Chicago, New York and Los Angeles publish Socrata timestamps, Seattle stores YYYYMMDD as text, New Orleans a plain YYYY-MM-DD string. One comparison style silently returns nothing for two of the five cities, and nothing looks exactly like a quiet week. Each city is queried in its own format and every date comes back normalised to YYYY-MM-DD.

Cities covered

City	Typical new licenses per month	Notes
Chicago, IL	about 2,200	License type and business activity, ward, coordinates
Los Angeles, CA	about 1,000	NAICS description, council district
Seattle, WA	about 370	NAICS, ownership type, phone
New Orleans, LA	about 190	Business type, owner name, phone
New York City, NY	published in batches	DCWP licenses. The newest rows can run a few weeks behind the other cities

Every source is official municipal open data. No API key, no account, no proxy.

Want a city that is not here? Suggest it.

Filter to the businesses you actually sell to

The keywords field matches against the license type, category or NAICS description, so you can cut a general feed down to your own market:

• Restaurant and food service: restaurant, food, caterer, mobile food
• Bars and liquor: liquor, tavern, alcohol
• Personal care: salon, barber, cosmetology, spa
• Trades: contractor, plumbing, electrical, hvac
• Retail: retail, grocery, tobacco
• Care: day care, child care, home health

Leave it empty for every new license in the window.

What you get back

Field	What it is
businessName	The trading name, falling back to the legal name
legalName	The registered owner or legal entity, where published
licenseType	What the license is for
businessActivity	Chicago's more detailed activity description
issueDate	Normalised to YYYY-MM-DD across all five cities
address, city, sourceState, postalCode	Where they are
phone	Where the city publishes one
licenseNumber, naicsCode	For matching into your own systems
sourceCity, sourceUrl	Which register this came from

Two ready-made views: New licenses for the full record, and Call sheet trimmed to name, trade, address and phone.

Input

Field	Type	What it does
cities	array	Which city registers to read
lookbackDays	integer	How far back to reach. Match it to your schedule: 7 for weekly, 30 for monthly
keywords	array	Only these kinds of business. Empty means all
onlyNewSinceLastRun	boolean	Skip licenses already sent. On by default, and what makes this a feed
watchlistName	string	One memory per feed, so "restaurants" and "contractors" stay separate
maxResults	integer	Cap per run, split evenly between the selected cities
Alerts	strings	Slack, Discord, Telegram or a webhook, all optional

Example input

{
    "cities": ["chicago", "la", "seattle", "neworleans"],
    "lookbackDays": 7,
    "keywords": ["restaurant", "food", "liquor"],
    "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
    "watchlistName": "restaurants"
}

Example output

{
    "businessName": "HEM CAFE",
    "licenseType": "Limited-Service Restaurants",
    "naicsCode": "722513",
    "issueDate": "2026-09-19",
    "address": "3004 LAKE WASHINGTON BLVD",
    "city": "SEATTLE",
    "sourceState": "WA",
    "postalCode": "98144",
    "licenseNumber": "1234567",
    "sourceCity": "Seattle, WA",
    "sourceUrl": "https://data.seattle.gov/d/wnbq-64tb"
}

Common questions

How do I find new businesses that just opened? Schedule this weekly with lookbackDays set to 7 and onlyNewSinceLastRun on. Each run gives you the openings since the last one.

Can I get only new restaurants or new bars? Yes. Put restaurant, food or liquor in keywords and the feed is filtered to those license types.

Does it include phone numbers? Seattle, New Orleans and New York publish a phone number on many records. Chicago and Los Angeles do not, so those rows carry name and address only.

Will I get the same business twice? Not while onlyNewSinceLastRun is on and the watchlist name stays the same. Licenses are remembered by city and license id.

Why did New York return nothing? New York publishes DCWP licenses in batches rather than daily, so a short window can genuinely be empty there while the other cities are busy. Widen lookbackDays to see them.

Is this the same as building permits? No. A building permit means construction. A business license means a business is opening or has opened, which is a different and usually later signal.

Pricing

This Actor is billed per event, plus whatever your Apify plan covers. The events are:

Event	What triggers it
Actor start	Each run starts
License record	Each new license returned
Notification sent	Each Slack, Discord, Telegram or webhook delivery

The current rates are shown on this Actor's Store page. Free-plan runs return a small sample so you can see the output shape before subscribing; an Apify plan lifts the cap.

Limits worth knowing

• Five cities, not the whole country. Each one is covered from its official register rather than a scraped aggregator.
• Cities refresh their open data on their own schedules, so a license issued today may appear in a day or two.
• New Orleans publishes currently active licenses, so a business that has since closed drops out of the file.
• The memory of what has been sent holds the most recent 200,000 license ids per watchlist, which is far more than any lookback window can reach.

Need something else?

Another city, county permits, health inspections, or this delivered straight into your CRM: youssefarhan24@gmail.com