Federal Rulemaking Records — U.S. Federal Register

Official source. No API key. Pay per record.

This actor turns the U.S. government's Federal Register into clean, per-document records — every rule, proposed rule, notice, and presidential document, at the grain an organization tracks when it watches what its regulators are doing. Each run reads the official FederalRegister.gov API and delivers one row per document: the rule stage (proposed or final), the issuing agency, the publication and effective dates, the comment window, and the docket / CFR / RIN references — the regulatory-tracking facts, at document and agency grain, with no contact persons.

What this is, in one paragraph

The Federal Register is the daily journal of the U.S. federal government — where agencies publish proposed rules, final rules, notices, and presidential documents. FederalRegister.gov exposes all of it through a keyless API. This actor reads that API, follows its cursor pagination, and flattens each document into a single analysis-ready row: what it is, which agency issued it, when it was published and takes effect, when comments close, and the docket, CFR, and Regulation Identifier Number references that tie it into the rulemaking record. Values are verbatim. You are billed only for records actually delivered.

Who buys this and for what job

• Regulatory-affairs and compliance teams tracking proposed and final rules from the agencies that govern their industry, with comment deadlines surfaced.
• Law firms and policy shops monitoring rulemaking by agency, CFR title, or docket for their clients.
• Trade associations and lobbyists watching the pipeline of proposed rules and comment windows.
• Analysts and data engineers who want a keyless, one-call feed of federal rulemaking already reduced to document/agency fields.

Public domain — with the official-edition caveat

Federal Register documents are U.S. Government works and are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. §105 — free to reuse. Two honest boundaries travel on every record. First, FederalRegister.gov is explicit that it is a convenience prototype: "This site displays a prototype of a 'Web 2.0' version of the daily Federal Register. It is not an official legal edition" — so for anything legal, verify against the official edition (the govinfo.gov PDF). Second, the site's reuse terms state that "Republishers of Federal Register material are not permitted to use official NARA or OFR logos or seals" — this actor includes none. These are records for regulatory tracking, not legal advice.

Document / agency grain — no contact persons

This actor works at document and agency grain: the document's own metadata plus the issuing agency (an organization). It does not extract or emit any natural-person contact. As a structural safeguard, the free-text fields (title, abstract, action) are scrubbed of any email address or phone-number pattern before emit — verified by an acceptance test that feeds a document with a contact email and phone embedded in the abstract and asserts neither survives, plus a live sweep over real Federal Register documents (0 emails, 0 phones, 0 person fields emitted).

Pricing

Event	Free plan	Bronze	Silver	Gold / Platinum / Diamond
rulemaking_record	$0.05	$0.045	$0.04	$0.0335

Delivered before charged. Blocked runs and empty results cost nothing.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
types	string list	Rule, Proposed Rule	Which document types to pull: Rule (final), Proposed Rule, Notice, Presidential Document.
publishedFrom	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	—	Optional. Keep only documents published on or after this date.
publishedTo	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	—	Optional. Keep only documents published on or before this date.
agencySlug	string	—	Optional. Keep only documents from this agency (e.g. environmental-protection-agency).
maxRecords	integer	500	Ceiling on records delivered and billed.

The actor paces between pages and follows the API's own next_page_url cursor.

Output

One JSON object per document. Real example (values verbatim):

{
  "record_id": "2026-16942",
  "document_number": "2026-16942",
  "document_type": "Rule",
  "rule_stage": "final",
  "title": "Food Additives Permitted in Feed and Drinking Water of Animals; Chromium DL-methionine Chelate",
  "abstract": "The FDA is amending the food additive regulations ...",
  "action": "Final amendment; order.",
  "primary_agency": "Health and Human Services Department",
  "agency_names": ["Health and Human Services Department", "Food and Drug Administration"],
  "agency_slugs": ["health-and-human-services-department", "food-and-drug-administration"],
  "publication_date": "2026-08-19",
  "effective_on": "2026-08-19",
  "comments_close_on": null,
  "comment_url": null,
  "docket_ids": ["Docket No. FDA-2026-C-8831"],
  "regulation_id_numbers": [],
  "cfr_references": ["21 CFR 73"],
  "citation": "91 FR 53545",
  "significant": null,
  "regulations_dot_gov_docket": "FDA-2026-C-8831",
  "comments_count": 0,
  "source": "U.S. Federal Register (FederalRegister.gov API)",
  "source_url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/19/2026-16942/...",
  "licence": "U.S. Federal Register ... public domain (17 U.S.C. §105) ...",
  "attribution": "Source: U.S. Federal Register (Office of the Federal Register, NARA) via FederalRegister.gov API.",
  "observed_at": "2026-08-19T00:00:00Z"
}

An unbilled RUN_RECEIPT records the robots check, the filters, documents seen and delivered, and whether charged equals delivered.

Field reference

Each record is a flat set of regulatory-tracking fields. Identity: record_id / document_number, document_type, and a normalized rule_stage (proposed/final/other). Substance: title, abstract, and action (all scrubbed of any contact pattern). Who issued it: primary_agency, agency_names, and agency_slugs — organizations, never a named official. Timing: publication_date, effective_on, and comments_close_on with the comment_url. Rulemaking hooks: docket_ids, regulation_id_numbers (RINs), cfr_references (as title CFR part), the citation, the significant flag, and the Regulations.gov docket id plus live comments_count. Provenance: source, source_url, licence, attribution, disclaimer, and observed_at.

How a run works

A run first reads the site's robots policy and confirms the API path is allowed (it is — the Disallow list covers only the site's search pages, not /api/). It then builds a single query from your document types, date window, and optional agency, and reads a page of documents newest-first. Each document is flattened to one record and delivered before it is charged, so a run that is blocked at the door or finds nothing costs you nothing. The actor then follows the API's own next_page_url cursor — which uses a search_after token, so it paginates cleanly past the shallow-offset limit — pausing briefly between pages, and stops as soon as your maxRecords ceiling is reached. The run receipt's charge_equals_delivered flag lets you confirm you were billed for exactly what you received.

Cost guidance

One rulemaking_record per delivered document: cost = documents delivered × your plan's per-record price. The Federal Register publishes tens of thousands of documents per year — rules and proposed rules alone exceed the API's 10,000-per-query readout — so a dated or agency-scoped pull keeps runs bounded and cheap; 1,000 documents is $50 (Free) / $33.50 (Gold).

Honest limitations

• Not the official legal edition. For legal reliance, verify against the govinfo.gov PDF; this is the convenience API version.
• Document/agency grain. Full rule text and attachments are not included — this is the document metadata plus references.
• Point-in-time. Comment counts and effective dates are as of retrieval; re-run to refresh.
• No contact-person data is emitted, by design.

Differentiation

Distinct from fleet-1's court-records product: courts adjudicate, agencies make rules — different branch, different documents, different job. This actor is federal rulemaking specifically (the Federal Register), tracked at document and agency grain. It also complements the sibling eu-regulatory-change-records (EU legal acts) for buyers who track both jurisdictions.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of the NexGen Signal family of official-source, pay-per-record products:

• Grant Opportunity Records — US Grants.gov
• FDA Recall Risk Records — openFDA
• EU Tender Bid Signals — TED
• UK Contract Opportunity Records — Contracts Finder
• Organization Sanctions & LEI Risk
• Eurostat House Price Index

Source: U.S. Federal Register (Office of the Federal Register, NARA) via the FederalRegister.gov API. Public-domain U.S. Government work (17 U.S.C. §105); not the official legal edition — verify against govinfo.gov. Reformatted to document/agency records; values verbatim; no contact-person data emitted.