EUR-Lex Legislation Search & Full Text

Search EU legislation and get clean, structured data and full texts split into articles, in any of the 24 official EU languages. Built for compliance tools, legal research and RAG / AI pipelines that need the actual text of the GDPR, the AI Act, NIS2, DORA and every other EU regulation, directive and decision.

What it does

• Search EU acts by words in the title, document type, adoption date, or CELEX number
• Returns metadata: CELEX, title, type (regulation, implementing/delegated act, directive, decision, recommendation), adoption date, all entry-into-force dates (the AI Act has five), in-force status, ELI identifier and EUR-Lex link
• Optionally downloads the full text, cleaned of markup and footnotes
• Optionally splits the text into articles (number, heading, text): ready to index in a vector database or feed to an LLM

Data source

All data comes from the official open data of the EU Publications Office (Cellar SPARQL endpoint and content negotiation), the machine-readable channel the EU provides for exactly this purpose. No scraping of the EUR-Lex website, no proxies. EU legal texts can be reused under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU.

Examples

The GDPR and the AI Act in Italian, split into articles

{
  "celexNumbers": ["32016R0679", "32024R1689"],
  "language": "it",
  "includeFullText": true
}

All regulations about artificial intelligence still in force

{
  "titleContains": "artificial intelligence",
  "documentTypes": ["regulation"],
  "inForceOnly": true
}

Every directive adopted in 2026

{
  "documentTypes": ["directive"],
  "dateFrom": "2026-01-01"
}

Output

{
  "celex": "32024R1689",
  "title": "Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence ...",
  "documentType": "REG",
  "date": "2024-06-13",
  "entryIntoForce": ["2024-08-01", "2025-02-02", "2025-08-02", "2026-08-02", "2027-08-02"],
  "inForce": true,
  "eli": "http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj",
  "language": "en",
  "url": "https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32024R1689",
  "fullText": "...",
  "articles": [
    { "id": "art_1", "number": "Article 1", "title": "Subject matter", "text": "1. The purpose of this Regulation is ..." }
  ]
}

Tips

• CELEX numbers are the most precise way to fetch known acts: 3 + year + R/L/D + number (e.g. 32022L2555 is NIS2).
• Title search matches all words, in the language you choose: search in Italian with "language": "it" and Italian words.
• Corrigenda (corrections) are excluded by default; enable Include corrigenda to get them.
• Very old acts may not have an HTML text in every language; you still get the metadata and a note.

Limitations

• This version covers legislation (sector 3 of EUR-Lex). Case law of the Court of Justice and consolidated versions are on the roadmap: open an issue if you need them.
• Searches the title, not the full text.

Privacy

The Actor sends the developer an anonymous end-of-run notice (number of results, amount charged, duration, success or error) to monitor reliability. Your input, your results and your identity are never sent.

Feedback

Found a bug or need a field? Open an issue on the Actor page: issues are answered within a few days.