New Business Licenses Feed: 12 US & Canada Cities

A daily feed of newly issued business licences and newly opened business locations in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Norfolk (VA), Delaware (statewide), Marin County (CA), Calgary and Edmonton, taken directly from each government's official open-data portal. One clean, normalised schema across all twelve sources, with a "New since last run" mode for daily schedules.

New licences are the earliest public signal that a business is opening: a restaurant applying before its launch, a contractor setting up in town, a salon, clinic, studio or shop getting ready to open its doors.

Who it's for

• B2B sales and local lead generation. Reach new restaurants, bars, retailers, salons, clinics and contractors in their first weeks, when they buy POS systems, insurance, payroll, signage, fit-out, marketing, web, uniforms, cleaning and supplies.
• Commercial real estate, brokers and franchise developers. Track who is opening where, by ZIP, district and activity.
• Agencies and brand-activation teams. Spot new venues and retail openings for partnerships, launches and events.
• Market researchers and economic developers. Measure new-business formation by city, ZIP and NAICS sector.
• AI agents. Ask "which new restaurants got a licence in Chicago this week?" through the Apify API or MCP server.

What you get

• sourceCity, eventType (newBusinessLicense), eventDate (issue / location start / opened date).
• businessName (trade name when it is a real brand, else legal name), legalName, dbaName, entityType (llc, corporation, partnership, limited-company, company, public-or-nonprofit, trade-name), ownershipType (Seattle, Baton Rouge, Philadelphia).
• licenseType, businessActivity, naicsCode (SF, LA, Seattle, Baton Rouge), naicsDescription, licenseNumber, licenseId, licenseStartDate, expirationDate.
• Business premises: address (apartment numbers removed; blank for home-based businesses), city, state, zip, district (ward / council / supervisor district), neighborhood, latitude, longitude, homeBased.
• country (US / CA), datasetUrl, sourceDataset, retrievedAt.

Companies only, privacy by design. Sole proprietors, individual licensees and person-named companies ("JOHN SMITH LLC") are dropped. Phone numbers, e-mails, owner / officer / contact names and mailing addresses are never read or output.

Calgary and Edmonton publish only a trade name (no legal name or owner). Their records are kept only for commercial (non-home) premises or names with a legal-form suffix, and only when the trade name does not read like a personal name (for example "KEN'S CLEANING" is dropped). Those records have entityType trade-name and legalName empty. Set entityTypes without trade-name if you want registered legal entities only.

City	Official dataset (source link)	"New" means	Licence	Typical volume (companies)
Chicago, IL	Business Licenses r5kz-chrr, application type ISSUE	new licence issued	City of Chicago Data Portal terms (free reuse)	~100-150 / week
San Francisco, CA	Registered Business Locations g8m3-pdis	new location registered for SF business tax (some outside SF)	DataSF (PDDL / public domain)	~80 / week
Los Angeles, CA	Active Businesses 6rrh-rzua	new business tax registration (location start)	City of LA open data (free reuse)	~50 / week
Seattle, WA	Active Business License Tax Certificates wnbq-64tb	licence start date	City of Seattle open data (public domain)	~90 / week
Philadelphia, PA	L&I Business Licenses (Carto API, rental / vacant-property licences excluded)	initial issue date	City of Philadelphia License (OpenDataPhilly terms of use)	~50 / week
New Orleans, LA	Occupational Business Licenses hjcd-grvu	business start date	City of New Orleans open data (free reuse)	~5-10 / week
Baton Rouge, LA	Businesses Registered with EBR Parish xw6s-bcqm	business open date (open accounts)	Public domain	~20 / week
Norfolk, VA	Business Licenses dpi6-sct5	business opened date	City of Norfolk open data (free reuse)	~5-10 / week
Delaware (statewide)	Delaware Business Licenses 5zy2-grhr	licence valid-from date (Jan 1 renewals excluded)	Public domain	~15-40 / week
Marin County, CA	Active Business Licenses jfy7-shxv (unincorporated county)	licence issue date	ODbL (County of Marin)	~2-5 / week (updated every few weeks)
Calgary, AB	Calgary Business Licences vdjc-pybd	first issue date (commercial premises)	Open Government Licence - City of Calgary	~60-70 / week
Edmonton, AB	City of Edmonton - Business Licences qhi4-bdpu	original issue date	Open Government Licence - City of Edmonton	~120 / week

Quick start

Run with the defaults ({}) to get the 36 newest company licences (3 per city) from each city's latest 7 days of data. Takes about 10-20 seconds.

New restaurants, bars and cafés in the last two weeks:

{ "keywords": ["restaurant", "bar", "cafe", "food", "brew"], "daysBack": 14, "maxItems": 200 }

New construction contractors in Seattle and LA (NAICS 23):

{ "sources": ["seattle", "losAngeles"], "naicsPrefixes": ["23"], "daysBack": 30, "maxItems": 300 }

Daily feed: create a Schedule (e.g. every morning) with

{ "mode": "sinceLastRun", "stateKey": "my-feed", "maxItems": 1000 }

Each run then delivers only licences you have not received before (the last 14 days are re-checked, because cities publish with a few days' lag). Use a different stateKey per saved search.

Input

Field	Meaning
mode	window (default, stateless) or sinceLastRun (only new records per stateKey)
sources	Cities: chicago, sanFrancisco, losAngeles, seattle, norfolk, newOrleans, philadelphia, batonRouge, delaware, marin, calgary, edmonton (default all)
daysBack	Window length in days, ending at each city's newest published date (default 7; 14 in sinceLastRun)
date	Optional YYYY-MM-DD window end for backfills
keywords	Any of these words in the name, trade name, licence type or activity
naicsPrefixes	NAICS code prefixes (SF, LA, Seattle, Baton Rouge only)
zipCodes	5-digit ZIP codes
entityTypes	Restrict to LLCs, corporations, nonprofits, ... (trade-name = Calgary/Edmonton trade-name-only records)
maxItems	Cap per run (also caps your spend), default 36
stateKey	Saved-state name for sinceLastRun

Sample output

{
  "source": "chicago",
  "sourceCity": "Chicago",
  "sourceState": "IL",
  "eventType": "newBusinessLicense",
  "eventDate": "2026-10-29",
  "businessName": "TAVOLA PIENA",
  "legalName": "TAVOLA PIENA LLC",
  "dbaName": "TAVOLA PIENA",
  "entityType": "llc",
  "ownershipType": null,
  "licenseId": "3108871",
  "licenseNumber": "3108871",
  "licenseType": "Pop-Up Retail User",
  "businessActivity": "61-90 Day Retail Pop Up Vendor (Sale of General Merchandise)",
  "naicsCode": null,
  "naicsDescription": null,
  "homeBased": false,
  "address": "1821 W CHICAGO AVE 1ST",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "state": "IL",
  "zip": "60622",
  "district": "Ward 36",
  "neighborhood": "West Town",
  "latitude": 41.8958669323,
  "longitude": -87.6730484057,
  "licenseStartDate": "2026-10-29",
  "expirationDate": "2027-02-05",
  "datasetUrl": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/r5kz-chrr",
  "sourceDataset": "City of Chicago - Business Licenses (new issuances)",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-11-01T07:06:16.679Z"
}

See sample-output.json for more records. A run summary (per-city windows, rows read, records dropped by the company-only screen, errors) is saved as the OUTPUT record.

Data sources and licences

All data comes from official government open-data portals without keys: the public Socrata SODA API (Chicago, DataSF, Los Angeles, Seattle, Norfolk, New Orleans, Open Data BR, Delaware Open Data, Marin County, Calgary, Edmonton) and the City of Philadelphia's public Carto SQL API (OpenDataPhilly). Licences are listed per source in the table above; all allow free reuse (Calgary and Edmonton data: Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - City of Calgary / City of Edmonton). The Actor identifies itself in its User-Agent and makes about 2 small requests per source per run. Data has been processed by this Actor (filtered to companies, normalised, deduplicated, apartment numbers removed). Not affiliated with any city. Licence "issue" or "start" dates are as published by each city; a few cities publish future-dated start dates, which are ignored until they arrive.

Pricing

Pay per event. You pay only for records delivered.

Event	Price	Charged
Actor start	$0.005	once per run
Business record	$0.003	per new business licence delivered to the dataset

No separate platform-usage charges: compute is included in the event prices.

Example: the default run (36 records) costs $0.113. A daily all-city sinceLastRun schedule (about 80 new company licences per day) costs about $0.245 per day (about $7.35 per month). maxItems and Apify's max cost per run cap your spend; the Actor stops delivering when your budget is reached.

FAQ

Why not every licence? Licences held by individuals and sole proprietors are dropped on purpose (privacy). Each record is an LLC, corporation, partnership, nonprofit or public body. A name screen also drops companies named after a person; it is heuristic, so a few brand names that look like personal names may be dropped too.

Why are there no phone numbers or e-mails? Some city datasets contain them, but this feed never reads them. Use the business name and address with your own enrichment tools.

How fresh is it? Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Delaware, Calgary and Edmonton refresh daily or near-daily; Norfolk a few times a week; Marin County every few weeks. The window always ends at each city's newest published date, so a run never comes back empty because a city has not published today yet.

Why are New York City, Winnipeg or Kansas City not included? Their licence datasets currently lag by a month or more (NYC DCWP since August, Winnipeg monthly, Kansas City since January), so they are not a useful daily signal. Berkeley and Cincinnati publish no usable issue date / business name. More cities may be added; ask in the Issues tab.

Is this the same as new company registrations? No. Secretary of State filings show new legal entities; city licences show businesses actually opening a location in a specific city, with an address and activity.