HSR Early Termination Notices — FTC Merger Deal Records

Official source. No API key. Pay per record.

This actor gives you the US Federal Trade Commission's Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) early termination notices as structured records. When companies file a merger or acquisition under the HSR Act, they must wait before closing; when the FTC and the Department of Justice grant early termination of that waiting period, the FTC publishes a notice naming the acquiring party, the acquired party and the entities being acquired. Each record is one notice: the HSR transaction number, the date early termination was granted, both parties and the acquired entities, read from the FTC's own Legal Library.

On 27 September 2026 the FTC's list held 28,134 rows, from January 1999 to 21 September 2026. Early termination grants were suspended in February 2021 — the list holds only 10 notices from March 2021 to the end of 2024 — and resumed in 2025, with 381 notices that year and 26–62 a month delivered by this actor in 2026.

Use it three ways:

• Deal flow feed. Run it weekly with lastDays: 7 to get newly cleared deals — often before closing is announced.
• Company or sponsor history. search: "Blackstone" or partyContains returns every notice naming that party, back to 1999.
• Research datasets. Date ranges give you clean deal panels for M&A, private-equity and antitrust research.

Who buys this and for what job

• M&A advisers, bankers and deal-sourcing teams tracking which acquisitions have just cleared US antitrust review, and which sponsors are most active.
• Private-equity and credit investors watching competitors' add-on acquisitions and new platform deals.
• Merger-arbitrage and event-driven funds that need the clearance date for a pending deal from the source.
• Antitrust lawyers, economists and academics building HSR clearance datasets.
• Business journalists and newsletters covering deals.

Sample output

{
  "record_id": "HSR-ET:20262188",
  "transaction_number": "20262188",
  "early_termination_date": "2026-09-21",
  "acquiring_party": "Providence Equity Partners IX-A S.C.Sp.",
  "acquired_party": "CheckedUp Investors, LLC",
  "acquired_entities": ["CheckedUp Intermediate, LLC"],
  "acquired_entities_withheld": 0,
  "notice_url": "https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/early-termination-notices/20262188",
  "source": "US Federal Trade Commission — Early Termination Notices under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, FTC Legal Library (https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/early-termination-notices)",
  "licence": "US Government work in the public domain — the FTC's data catalogue lists the HSR Early Termination Notices with the licence http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/.",
  "attribution": "Source: US Federal Trade Commission, HSR Early Termination Notices; reformatted by NexGen Signal.",
  "observed_at": "2026-09-27T16:39:33Z"
}

Pricing

Apify plan	Price per record
Free	$0.05
Bronze	$0.045
Silver	$0.04
Gold and above	$0.0335

You pay only for records delivered to your dataset. maxRecords caps what a run can cost: 500 records cost $25 on the Free plan. Notices withheld under the privacy rule below are never charged.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
lastDays	Only notices granted in the last N days	not set
fromDate, toDate	Only notices dated between two days (YYYY-MM-DD)	not set
search	Words passed to the FTC's own search on the list, e.g. Pfizer, Blackstone	none
partyContains	Keep only notices where a party or acquired entity contains this text (not case-sensitive)	none
maxRecords	Maximum records delivered and billed; newest notices come first	10

Default changed on 30 Sep 2026: if you leave maxRecords out, a run now returns up to 10 records (it was 500). Set maxRecords yourself to get more — the maximum is unchanged.

Example — this week's cleared deals:

{"lastDays": 7, "maxRecords": 500}

Example — one company's full HSR early termination history:

{"search": "Pfizer", "maxRecords": 200}

(On 27 September 2026 that returned 28 notices, from Pfizer's acquisition of Metsera, Inc. on 31 October 2025 back to 1999; 4 more were withheld because a party may be a natural person.)

Output

Field	Meaning
record_id	HSR-ET:<transaction number> — unique per notice
transaction_number	The HSR transaction number (the year is its first four digits)
early_termination_date	Date early termination was granted, as the FTC lists it
acquiring_party	The acquiring person — the ultimate parent entity — as the FTC names it
acquired_party	The acquired person — often the seller's or target's ultimate parent
acquired_entities	The entities or assets being acquired, as the FTC lists them
acquired_entities_withheld	How many acquired-entity entries were withheld as possible natural persons
notice_url	The notice page on ftc.gov
source, licence, attribution, observed_at	Provenance on every record

Names are the FTC's, as published, spaces trimmed. Nothing is renamed, matched or merged.

Cost guidance

A lastDays: 7 run on 27 September 2026 delivered 18 records ($0.60 on Gold). At the 2026 pace a year of notices is about 570 records (about $19 on Gold). One company's history is usually a few to a few dozen records. The full archive is roughly 20,000 records after the privacy rule (about $670 on Gold) and takes about two hours or more to read, because the FTC asks crawlers to wait 5 seconds between pages.

How a run works

The actor reads the FTC's robots.txt first and follows it exactly, including its wildcard rules and its Crawl-delay of 5 seconds. The FTC's robots.txt disallows the list's items_per_page option, so the actor never uses it and reads the default pages of 20 notices. A 500-record run took about 3½ minutes in testing; smaller searches and short date ranges took 8–80 seconds.

Paging through the whole unfiltered list is not stable — in testing it repeated 1–3 notices in the first 35 pages, which means others were skipped. So large reads go month by month: each calendar month is read in full and checked against the count the FTC reports for that month, with one re-read if anything is missing. Every complete read in testing matched the FTC's count (for example 284 of 284 notices for June–September 2026, 183 of 183 for January–March 2019). Result sets of up to 400 notices are read straight through and checked the same way. The run receipt (RUN_RECEIPT) records the robots decision, pages read, notices seen and withheld, and any window that stayed short with its counts.

Records are pushed to your dataset first and charged only after they are delivered; if you set a maximum charge, the run stops cleanly when it is reached. If the FTC's site cannot be reached after several retries, the run ends with a clear message and nothing is charged.

Honest limitations

• Privacy rule: notices naming a possible person are withheld. The FTC names the ultimate parent of each side, and that is sometimes an individual. A notice is delivered only when both the acquiring and the acquired party carry a legal-form or organisation word (Inc., LLC, L.P., plc, GmbH, Holdings, Fund, Partners and similar). In testing this withheld about 28% of notices — including some genuine companies whose names carry no such word (for example "Johnson & Johnson" or "ConocoPhillips") and trusts named only "… Trust". Acquired-entity entries that fail the same test are withheld and counted.
• Early terminations only. Deals that waited out the full HSR period, were challenged or were abandoned never appear here; the FTC does not publish HSR filings themselves.
• No deal values or terms. The notice gives parties and entities only.
• The 2021–2024 gap is the FTC's. Early termination was suspended from February 2021 until 2025.
• Party names are as filed. Spellings vary across years (for example "Pfizer Inc." and "Pfizer, Inc."), and a few older rows carry typos.
• A few empty placeholder rows in the FTC's list have no transaction number or date; they are skipped and counted in the receipt.

Licence and attribution

The FTC's data catalogue lists the HSR Early Termination Notices with the US public-domain label (http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/); they are a US Government work. Every record carries the credit Source: US Federal Trade Commission, HSR Early Termination Notices; reformatted by NexGen Signal. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FTC.

Differentiation

Deal-signal actors on the Store, such as signalbase/signalbase-acquisitions, collect acquisition announcements from news and press releases, and jungle_synthesizer/ec-merger-decisions-scraper covers EU merger decisions. This actor reads the US antitrust agency's own clearance record: the HSR transaction number and the date the government let the deal proceed, back to 1999, from a public-domain source.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of NexGen Signal — official-source data products, no API keys, pay per record. Related actors:

• Funding Round Intelligence API — SEC Form D, TechCrunch & YC
• Domain to Legal Entity & LEI — GLEIF Company Identity Lookup
• US Business Entity Search & Status Check — 7 States
• Federal Rulemaking Records — US Federal Register
• Press Release Monitor API — PR Newswire