E-Rate Form 470 RFP Scraper (USAC School & Library Bids)

Pulls every E-Rate FCC Form 470 posting from USAC open data as one clean JSON record per Form 470: the school, district, library or consortium buying, every service request it lists, the allowable contract date, the applicant, technical and consultant contacts, and a direct link to every attached RFP document. Filter by funding year, state, service category, service type, applicant name, posting date, or RFP-only.

Every US school district, school, library and consortium that wants an E-Rate discount on connectivity has to post a Form 470 first, then wait 28 days before it can sign anything. That posting is the buying signal. USAC publishes all of it, but at a grain nobody can use: the source emits one row per service request per attached RFP document, so a single Form 470 with four service requests and three attachments arrives as twelve near-identical rows. 1.6 million rows, one usable feed hiding inside. This Actor gives you back the form.

Who uses this data

• ISPs, fiber and broadband providers chasing Category 1 contracts. Filter to your states, Category 1, and rfpOnly, and you get the postings with a real written spec you can bid.
• Network, Wi-Fi, switching and AV vendors and their resellers working Category 2, where manufacturer and function tell you whether the district already specced your gear or a competitor's.
• E-Rate consultants and RFP-response shops that need the document itself, not a notification. Every attachment is a direct URL, and the consultant of record is on every posting.
• EdTech, managed-service and gov-contracting BD teams building territory lists: applicant type, entity name, state and contacts on every posting.
• Market analysts tracking E-Rate demand by year, category, service type and geography.

What you get

One dataset item per Form 470 posting, newest certification first. Real item, descriptions trimmed:

{
  "source": "https://opendata.usac.org/resource/jt8s-3q52.json",
  "attribution": "Universal Service Administrative Company",
  "sourceRecordUrl": "https://opendata.usac.org/resource/jt8s-3q52.json?application_number=270000411",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-08-23T11:39:14.800Z",
  "applicationNumber": "270000411",
  "formNickname": "FO27-47001-C1 Internet Access",
  "fundingYear": 2027,
  "status": "Certified",
  "certifiedDate": "2026-08-20T15:31:24",
  "allowableContractDate": "2026-09-17",
  "formPdfUrl": "https://publicdata.usac.org/EPC/Prd/Form470/270000411/17013307/22418036-USAC_FCC_FORM_470_APPLICATION_270000411_CERTIFIED.pdf",
  "billedEntityNumber": "17013307",
  "billedEntityName": "Futuro Academy Incorporated",
  "applicantType": "School",
  "billedEntityState": "NV",
  "billedEntityAddress": { "line1": "920 N LAMB BLVD", "city": "LAS VEGAS", "state": "NV", "zip": "89110" },
  "contact": { "name": "Ignacio Prado", "email": "director@futuroacademy.org", "phone": "702-509-1612" },
  "technicalContact": { "name": "Ignacio Prado", "title": "Executive Director", "email": "director@futuroacademy.org" },
  "consultants": [
    { "name": "Funds for Learning", "registrationNumber": "16024808", "email": "jharrington@fundsforlearning.com" }
  ],
  "serviceCategories": ["Category 1"],
  "serviceTypes": ["Data Transmission and/or Internet Access"],
  "serviceRequestCount": 1,
  "serviceRequests": [
    {
      "serviceRequestId": 1,
      "serviceCategory": "Category 1",
      "serviceType": "Data Transmission and/or Internet Access",
      "function": "Internet Access and Data Transmission Service",
      "quantity": 1, "unit": "Each",
      "minimumCapacity": "1024.00 Mbps", "maximumCapacity": "5120.00 Mbps",
      "installationAndInitialConfiguration": true, "manufacturer": null,
      "rfpAttachmentCount": 1,
      "rfpDocuments": [
        { "url": "https://publicdata.usac.org/EPC/Prd/Form470/270000411/17013307/22417667-FO27_RFP_Internet%20Access.pdf",
          "uploadDate": "2026-08-20T15:08:25" }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "hasRfpDocuments": true,
  "rfpDocumentCount": 1,
  "rfpDocuments": [ { "url": "https://publicdata.usac.org/EPC/.../FO27_RFP_Internet%20Access.pdf", "uploadDate": "2026-08-20T15:08:25" } ],
  "categoryOneDescription": "Futuro Academy Incorporated is seeking bids for the following services: Internet Access wi ...",
  "stateOrLocalRestrictions": true,
  "stateOrLocalRestrictionsDescription": "Bid responses must be emailed to Ignacio Prado at director@futuroacademy.org ...",
  "sourceRowCount": 1
}

Also present: sourceDatasetPage, formVersion, lastModifiedDate, billedEntityFccRegistrationNumber, billedEntityEmail, billedEntityPhone, websiteUrl, numberOfEligibleEntities, authorizedPerson, categoryTwoDescription, installment, statewideState, allPublicSchoolDistricts, allNonPublicSchools, allLibraries, and otherFunction / otherManufacturer / entities / maintenanceAndTechnicalSupport per service request.

Postings are deduplicated on applicationNumber. allowableContractDate is a plain ISO date. certifiedDate, lastModifiedDate and RFP uploadDate are ISO 8601 wall-clock times exactly as USAC publishes them; the source carries no timezone offset for these, so none is invented. Missing values are null, never an empty string.

Input

Everything is optional. Run it with no input and you get the 100 newest postings for the current funding year.

Field	Type	Default	Notes
fundingYear	string	current	2027, current, or all. Funding year N runs 1 July N-1 to 30 June N.
state	string[]	-	Two-letter billed-entity states, exact match, e.g. ["NY","NJ"].
serviceCategory	enum	any	Category 1 (broadband to the building) or Category 2 (inside it).
serviceType	string	-	Substring, e.g. internet, Internal Connections, Basic Maintenance.
keyword	string	-	Substring on the billed entity name, e.g. unified, Public Library.
postedFrom / postedTo	ISO date	-	Form 470 certification date range, the date the bidding clock started.
rfpOnly	boolean	false	Only postings that actually carry an RFP document.
maxResults	integer	100	1 to 50000. This is your cost cap: you pay per delivered posting.
includeRaw	boolean	false	Attach raw, the untouched source rows behind the posting.

Service-level filters (serviceCategory, serviceType, rfpOnly) select a posting that has at least one matching service request, and the delivered posting still carries all of its service requests. A district that attached an RFP to its fiber request but not to its cabling request comes back whole.

current is the E-Rate funding year in force today. A funding year opens on 1 July with almost nothing in it, so current automatically widens to include the previous funding year when the current one cannot fill your maxResults; the run summary records whether that happened.

Example inputs

Category 1 internet and WAN RFPs in your states (ISP and fiber bid desk):

{
  "state": ["NY", "NJ", "PA"],
  "serviceCategory": "Category 1",
  "rfpOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 200
}

New Category 2 postings this week (network and Wi-Fi vendors, daily alert):

{
  "serviceCategory": "Category 2",
  "postedFrom": "2026-08-17",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Every library posting for the funding year (territory list):

{
  "fundingYear": "2027",
  "keyword": "Library",
  "maxResults": 1000
}

Pricing

$0.004 per record; you pay only for records delivered. One charge per posting, nothing else; the actor pays for its own source requests. maxResults is your bill: 100 postings is $0.40. Filters are applied before delivery, so a narrow search costs less than a broad one, and a search that matches nothing costs nothing. A broad, unfiltered run that came back empty is treated as a broken read and fails the run rather than reporting an empty feed.

Data source, refresh and licence

All data comes from the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) open data portal, dataset E-Rate FCC Form 470 Tool Data (jt8s-3q52):

• Dataset page: https://opendata.usac.org/E-Rate/E-Rate-FCC-Form-470-Tool-Data/jt8s-3q52
• API endpoint read by this Actor: https://opendata.usac.org/resource/jt8s-3q52.json

Refresh: USAC publishes an update frequency of Daily for this dataset. Run the Actor on a schedule and you track USAC's own refresh; the run summary under the OUTPUT key records the exact filters, the SODA $where used, row and posting counts, and fetchedAt.

Licence: USAC publishes the dataset under the licence "Public Domain" and asks for the attribution "Universal Service Administrative Company", which is carried on every record in the attribution field. opendata.usac.org/robots.txt allows /resource/ and asks for Crawl-delay: 1; this Actor sends a descriptive User-Agent, makes one request at a time, and never less than a second apart. No login or API key is involved.

This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by USAC or the FCC. Buyers are responsible for their own use of the data.

Limitations

• A Form 470 is a request, not an award. It tells you who is buying and when they can sign. Who won is a different USAC dataset (Form 471 / funding commitments).
• Canceled forms are delivered, not hidden. status is Certified or Canceled; USAC publishes both. Filter on status downstream if you only want live ones. A canceled form often requested nothing at all, in which case serviceRequests is [] and serviceRequestCount is 0; the posting is still delivered, with its applicant block intact.
• The 28-day clock is yours to compute. allowableContractDate is the earliest date the applicant may sign, as published. This Actor does not infer a bid deadline; applicants set their own, usually inside the RFP document or in stateOrLocalRestrictionsDescription.
• RFP attachments are hosted by USAC, not mirrored here. Records carry the URL; the file itself stays at publicdata.usac.org.
• Fields are as published. USAC's own completeness notes say not-required fields are frequently blank; those arrive as null. rfpAttachmentCount is USAC's own count and can disagree with the number of distinct document URLs on the record.
• No per-form web page. USAC publishes no public HTML deep link for an individual Form 470, so records link to the certified form PDF and to the source rows on the API instead.

FAQ

How do I search E-Rate Form 470 postings by state?

Set state to one or more two-letter codes. Add serviceCategory, serviceType or rfpOnly to keep only the postings you can bid, and postedFrom to keep only the ones certified since your last run.

What is the difference between Category 1 and Category 2 in E-Rate?

Category 1 is connectivity to the building (data transmission and internet access). Category 2 is inside the building: internal connections, managed internal broadband services and basic maintenance. serviceCategory filters on either, and every service request carries its own category.

How do I find Form 470s that have an RFP attached?

Set rfpOnly: true. Each delivered posting then carries at least one document URL in rfpDocuments, with its upload date, and the full list per service request.

When can an E-Rate applicant sign a contract after posting a Form 470?

No earlier than the allowableContractDate, 28 days after the form is certified. Bid due dates are set by the applicant, usually in the RFP document or in stateOrLocalRestrictionsDescription.

How often is the USAC Form 470 data updated?

USAC lists the dataset's update frequency as Daily. A scheduled daily run with postedFrom set to yesterday gives you a new-postings feed.

Does this show who won the contract?

No. Awards and funding commitments are on the Form 471 side of USAC open data. This dataset is the request side only.

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