📜 Federal Register Scraper

🚀 Export every Federal Register document in seconds. Final rules, proposed rules, notices, and presidential documents from the daily journal of the United States government.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-25 · 📊 10 fields per record · Full archive coverage · All federal agencies

The Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents. This scraper turns that firehose into structured data you can filter by agency, document type, search term, and publication date range.

Coverage includes every document published since 1994 across 400+ executive branch agencies and sub-agencies, including the EPA, FDA, FAA, SEC, Treasury, and the Executive Office of the President. Each record returns the document number, title, type, publication date, abstract, agency list, and direct links to the official HTML page and PDF.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Compliance teams, regulatory analysts, lobbyists, journalists, policy researchers, law firms	Tracking new rules, monitoring agency activity, building regulatory alerts, historical research, training LLMs on US regulations

📋 What the Federal Register Scraper does

• Pulls daily and historical Federal Register documents via the official API
• Filters by document type (Final Rule, Proposed Rule, Notice, Presidential Document)
• Filters by agency slug, search term, and publication date range
• Returns abstract, agency list, publication date, and official PDF links
• Paginates automatically up to your requested maxItems

💡 Why it matters: Federal Register rules govern trillions of dollars of regulated activity. Catching a new proposed rule the day it drops is the difference between shaping policy and reacting to it.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Description
searchTerm	string	Free-text search across document content
maxItems	integer	How many records to return (free=10, paid up to 1M)
documentType	array	RULE / PRORULE / NOTICE / PRESDOCU
publicationDateGte	string	Earliest date YYYY-MM-DD
publicationDateLte	string	Latest date YYYY-MM-DD
agencySlugs	array	Agency slugs e.g. environmental-protection-agency

Example A. Newest 25 documents:

{ "maxItems": 25 }

Example B. EPA proposed rules in 2025:

{
  "documentType": ["PRORULE"],
  "agencySlugs": ["environmental-protection-agency"],
  "publicationDateGte": "2025-01-01",
  "publicationDateLte": "2025-12-31",
  "maxItems": 500
}

⚠️ Good to Know: The Federal Register API returns up to 10,000 documents per query. For larger date ranges, split into multiple runs by year or quarter.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
📄 documentNumber	string	Official Federal Register document number
📌 title	string	Document title
📑 type	string	Rule / Proposed Rule / Notice / Presidential Document
🔗 url	string	Official federalregister.gov HTML page
📅 publicationDate	string	Publication date
🏛️ agencies	string	Semicolon-separated list of issuing agencies
📝 abstract	string	Document abstract
📕 pdfUrl	string	Official PDF on govinfo.gov
🔍 publicInspectionPdfUrl	string	Public inspection PDF
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection

Sample record:

{
  "documentNumber": "2026-10400",
  "title": "Restoring Integrity to America's Financial System",
  "type": "Presidential Document",
  "url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/22/2026-10400/restoring-integrity-to-americas-financial-system",
  "publicationDate": "2026-05-22",
  "agencies": "Executive Office of the President",
  "abstract": null,
  "pdfUrl": "https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-05-22/pdf/2026-10400.pdf"
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• 🇺🇸 Official Federal Register API source, full coverage 1994 to present
• 🎯 Filter by agency, type, date, and free-text in one call
• 📦 Export to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML
• 🔄 Cloud-based, schedule daily for new rule alerts

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Result
Manual federalregister.gov browsing	Slow, no bulk export
Email alerts	One agency at a time, no structured data
Building your own API client	Days of work plus pagination, rate limit, error handling
This Actor	One-click structured export with filters

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 credit
2. Open this Actor
3. Set your filters and maxItems
4. Click Start
5. Download CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the dataset

💼 Business use cases

Compliance and legal: monitor proposed rules in your industry before they take effect. Government affairs: feed new agency notices into your tracking dashboards. Journalism: catch federal actions on the day they publish. LLM training: build a clean corpus of US regulatory text.

🔌 Automating Federal Register Scraper

Connect to Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Drive, or any tool via the Apify API and webhooks. Schedule daily runs to be notified of every new Federal Register document.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research: longitudinal studies of US regulatory activity. Personal: track rules affecting your hobby or trade. Non-profit: monitor agency notices relevant to your mission. Experimentation: train classifiers on regulatory text.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Paste this README into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Copilot and ask how to use the scraper for your specific workflow.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: 📅 How current is the data? A: New documents appear in the API the morning of publication.

Q: 📦 What formats can I export? A: CSV, Excel, JSON, XML directly from the Apify dataset UI.

Q: 🔍 Can I search inside document text? A: Yes, the searchTerm field runs a full-text search on the Federal Register index.

Q: 🏛️ Can I filter by multiple agencies? A: Yes, pass an array of agency slugs.

Q: 📅 How far back does it go? A: All Federal Register documents published since 1994.

Q: 🆔 What is a document number? A: The unique identifier assigned by the Office of the Federal Register, e.g. 2026-10400.

Q: 📕 Are PDFs included? A: Direct PDF links are included. The PDFs themselves are hosted on govinfo.gov.

Q: 🔒 Is the data official? A: Yes, every record comes from the official Federal Register API.

Q: 💰 What does it cost? A: Free users get 10 items. Paid users get up to 1,000,000 per run.

Q: ⏰ Can I schedule daily runs? A: Yes, use Apify scheduling for daily, weekly, or hourly runs.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Drive, Google Sheets, BigQuery, S3, webhooks, REST API.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more government data scrapers.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: Independent tool, not affiliated with the Office of the Federal Register or any US federal agency. Only publicly available data is collected.