Federal Register Scraper – Agency, Type & Comment Deadlines

Pulls US Federal Register documents — final rules, proposed rules, notices and presidential documents — from the Federal Register's own official public API (federalregister.gov, run by NARA and the GPO) and returns them as one flat, typed dataset.

No API key, no login, no proxy. Public government data only.

What you get

30 flat fields per document, including the ones most Federal Register Actors leave out:

Field	Why it matters
commentsCloseOn	The public-comment deadline — when you have to act by. Present on 92% of proposed rules and about a third of notices (measured on a live 200-row sample per type).
significant	The Executive Order 12866 "significant rule" flag. Set on final and proposed rules only (~40% of them); always null on notices and presidential documents.
regulationIdNumbers	RIN — joins a document to its entry in reginfo.gov's Unified Agenda.
docketIds	Regulations.gov docket IDs, so you can pull the comment file.
cfrReferences	Flattened to readable strings like 40 CFR 257.
agencyNames / agencySlugs / parentAgencyNames	One document usually lists a department and the bureau that wrote it; both are kept, split by level.
fullTextUrl	Public URL of the complete document body as plain text. Free to fetch yourself — we don't charge you a second row for it.
url, pdfUrl, citation, startPage, endPage, pageLength	Cite it in a memo without a second lookup.

Plus documentNumber, type, subtype, title, abstract, action, datesText, publicationDate, effectiveOn, signingDate, topics, president, executiveOrderNumber, excerpt, jsonUrl.

Who uses this

• Regulatory-affairs and compliance teams tracking every rule touching their sector, with the comment deadline attached.
• Trade and customs consultancies watching tariff, AD/CVD and export-control notices.
• Law firms and lobbyists monitoring a docket or RIN from proposed rule to final rule.
• Industry associations building a weekly "what changed" digest for members.

Input

{
  "documentTypes": ["RULE", "PRORULE"],
  "agencies": ["Environmental Protection Agency"],
  "commentsOpenOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Input	Notes
documentTypes	RULE, PRORULE, NOTICE, PRESDOCU. All four by default.
agencies	Slug (environmental-protection-agency) or full name — both are resolved against the official 472-agency list, and anything unrecognised is reported in the log instead of silently returning zero rows. Filtering by a parent agency includes its sub-agencies: homeland-security-department also returns Coast Guard, FEMA, CBP, TSA and USCIS documents.
publicationDateFrom / publicationDateTo	YYYY-MM-DD. Defaults to the last 90 days; the archive goes back to 1994-01-03.
searchQuery	Full-text search across title and body.
significantOnly	EO 12866 significant rules only.
commentsOpenOnly	Only documents whose comment period closes today or later.
order	newest, oldest or relevance.
maxResults	Up to 50,000.

Sample output

{
  "documentNumber": "2026-18552",
  "type": "Proposed Rule",
  "title": "Wisconsin: Approval of State Coal Combustion Residuals Permit Program",
  "publicationDate": "2026-09-11",
  "commentsCloseOn": "2026-11-10",
  "agencyNames": ["Environmental Protection Agency"],
  "docketIds": ["EPA-HQ-OLEM-2026-4324", "FRL-13374-01-OLEM"],
  "cfrReferences": ["40 CFR 257"],
  "citation": "91 FR 57842",
  "url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/11/2026-18552/wisconsin-approval-of-state-coal-combustion-residuals-permit-program",
  "fullTextUrl": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/text/2026/09/11/2026-18552.txt"
}

No 10,000-row wall

The Federal Register API's page-based paging stops hard at 10,000 rows (page=11 at per_page=1000 is an HTTP 400), and its count field is clamped at 10,000 even when far more documents match. This Actor pages with the API's own search_after_cursor instead, which walks straight past that limit — verified by pulling 14,000 consecutive rows in one run. Set maxResults to what you actually want; you will not hit a hidden ceiling at 10,000.

Pricing

$0.0008 per result, no Actor-start fee — the cheapest per-row price of any Federal Register Actor in the Store at the time of writing (the rest run $0.001–$0.005 per row, most with a start fee on top). 1,000 documents costs $0.80.

FAQ

Why did I get zero rows? The filters are ANDed. A searchQuery plus an agency plus significantOnly over a short date window often genuinely matches nothing — drop one filter. Also note significantOnly only ever matches rules and proposed rules, so pairing it with documentTypes: ["NOTICE"] always returns nothing. The run log spells out which cause applies.

Is significant reliable? It is reliable where it exists — on final and proposed rules. It is null by design on notices and presidential documents, so don't read null as "not significant" outside rules.

Does it fetch the full document text? No. Each row carries fullTextUrl, the public plain-text URL, so you fetch bodies only for the documents you care about instead of paying for text on every row.

Is this legal? Yes. federalregister.gov publishes this API for public reuse, the content is US-government work in the public domain, and no row contains personal data.

Related guides

• The Federal Register API says it has 10,000 documents. It doesn't — and the fix is already in the response — the full write-up of the clamped count, the 10,000-row offset wall and the search_after_cursor that walks past it, the per-document-type field-population table, and why a mistyped agency slug 400s the whole query.
• The FDA publishes every product recall as JSON — but you can't page past row 25,000 — the same "US government publishes it as keyless JSON" pattern, with a pagination wall that has no cursor escape hatch.
• All FetchSmith tools
• Source code