🌴 LA Business License Scraper

🚀 Export every active business registered with the City of Los Angeles complete with NAICS code, address, and council district.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-25 · 📊 19 fields per record · 500,000+ registered businesses · City of Los Angeles

The LA Business License Scraper pulls the LA City Office of Finance active business tax registration list directly from the LA Open Data portal, surfacing every business that has filed for an LA tax registration certificate.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Journalists and civic-tech researchers	Public-records reporting, accountability dashboards
Real-estate and insurance analysts	Neighborhood risk modeling, due diligence
Marketers and lead-gen teams	Business prospecting, market sizing
Data engineers and BI teams	ETL pipelines, automated alerting
Academics and urban planners	Policy research, public-health analysis

📋 What the LA Business Licenses Scraper does

• Pulls live records from the official open-data API in batches of up to 1,000 rows per request
• Lets you filter by the source's own native columns before download (no post-processing required)
• Returns one normalized JSON row per record with stable, predictable field names
• Pushes results to a clean Apify dataset that exports to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML
• Auto-paginates so you can pull thousands of records in one run

💡 Why it matters: government open-data portals throttle, rate-limit, and break under heavy load. This actor wraps the official endpoint, handles pagination, normalizes nulls, and gives you a stable schema even when the source UI rearranges its dashboard.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon - GIF demo of the actor running in Apify Console.

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
maxItems	integer	No	How many records to pull. Free plan caps at 10.
Filters	string	No	Optional source-native filters narrow results before download.

{
  "maxItems": 100
}

{
  "maxItems": 500
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the source endpoint is a public government open-data API. Records reflect what the agency has published as of its most recent refresh cycle and may not be real-time.

📊 Output

Field	Description
imageUrl	Image URL (always null for tabular records)
title	Primary record title (business name or activity)
url	Link back to the open data portal page
id	Stable identifier for this record
location_account	Source field location_account
business_name	Source field business_name
dba_name	Source field dba_name
street_address	Source field street_address
city	Source field city
zip_code	Source field zip_code
location_description	Source field location_description
mailing_address	Source field mailing_address
mailing_city	Source field mailing_city
mailing_zip_code	Source field mailing_zip_code
naics	Source field naics
primary_naics_description	Source field primary_naics_description
council_district	Source field council_district
location_start_date	Source field location_start_date
location_end_date	Source field location_end_date
sourceUrl	Open data portal URL
scrapedAt	ISO timestamp when the row was collected
error	Error message (null on success) - always last

Sample records

[
  {
    "imageUrl": null,
    "title": "539090 FILMPRODUCTIONS",
    "url": "https://data.lacity.org/Administration-Finance/Listing-of-Active-Businesses/6rrh-rzua",
    "id": "0000727369-0001-8",
    "location_account": "0000727369-0001-8",
    "business_name": "539090 FILMPRODUCTIONS",
    "dba_name": null,
    "street_address": "7740 SIDEWALK 173RD STREET",
    "city": "MIAMI",
    "zip_code": "33157-",
    "location_description": "7740 SIDEWALK 173RD 33157-",
    "mailing_address": null,
    "mailing_city": null,
    "mailing_zip_code": null,
    "naics": "512100",
    "primary_naics_description": "Motion picture & video industries (except video rental)",
    "council_district": "0",
    "location_start_date": null,
    "location_end_date": null,
    "sourceUrl": "https://data.lacity.org/Administration-Finance/Listing-of-Active-Businesses/6rrh-rzua",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-25T17:54:47.705Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "imageUrl": null,
    "title": "KCB PARTNERSHIP",
    "url": "https://data.lacity.org/Administration-Finance/Listing-of-Active-Businesses/6rrh-rzua",
    "id": "0000114891-0001-2",
    "location_account": "0000114891-0001-2",
    "business_name": "KCB PARTNERSHIP",
    "dba_name": null,
    "street_address": "5541 LAUREL CANYON BLVD",
    "city": "VALLEY VILLAGE",
    "zip_code": "91607-2179",
    "location_description": "5541 LAUREL CANYON 91607-2179",
    "mailing_address": "17383 W SUNSET BLVD #A100",
    "mailing_city": "PACIFIC PALISADES",
    "mailing_zip_code": "90272-4181",
    "naics": "531100",
    "primary_naics_description": "Lessors of real estate (including mini warehouses & self-storage units)",
    "council_district": "2",
    "location_start_date": null,
    "location_end_date": null,
    "sourceUrl": "https://data.lacity.org/Administration-Finance/Listing-of-Active-Businesses/6rrh-rzua",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-25T17:54:47.759Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	What it means
🟢 Live data	Pulls directly from the source API on every run
🔄 Auto-pagination	Walks the dataset 1,000 rows at a time
🎯 Native filters	Filter by the columns the source already indexes
📦 Stable schema	One row, one record, no nested table reshapes
💾 Multiple formats	CSV, Excel, JSON, XML on the dataset page

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Option	Effort	Pagination	Filters	Refresh
This actor	Run once	Built-in	Built-in	Per run
Direct API	Write SoQL by hand	DIY	DIY	DIY
CSV portal export	Download megabytes every time	None	Limited	Manual
Custom scraper	Weeks of engineering	DIY	DIY	DIY

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account (free credits included)
2. Open the actor page
3. Set maxItems and any filters you need
4. Click Run
5. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Market intelligence

Track the volume, type, and geography of records over time to surface trends before competitors do.

Compliance and risk

Pull official records for due diligence, vendor screening, insurance underwriting, or KYC workflows.

Lead generation

Filter the feed to surface businesses or properties matching a target profile.

Reporting and BI

Pipe the dataset into BI tools for ongoing public-records dashboards.

🔌 Automating LA Business Licenses Scraper

Connect this actor to Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, n8n, Pipedream, or Google Drive through the standard Apify integrations to run the scraper on a schedule and push results downstream automatically.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research

Academics use this data for urban studies, public-health epidemiology, and policy analysis.

Personal

Curious citizens can audit their own neighborhood or block-level activity.

Non-profit

Civic-tech and accountability organizations track service delivery, equity, and government performance.

Experimentation

Data-science learners get a clean real-world dataset for ML practice.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Paste the URL of this page into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or GitHub Copilot and ask: "How would I use this scraper to build X?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🟦 Is this real-time? It pulls the most recent data the source agency has published. Refresh cadence depends on the agency (often nightly or weekly).

🟦 Do I need an API key? No. The source endpoint is public.

🟦 What if a filter returns zero rows? The actor pushes a single {error: ...} record explaining the empty result so your pipelines do not silently fail.

🟦 Can I run this on a schedule? Yes. Configure a schedule on the Apify Console for hourly, daily, or weekly runs.

🟦 Can I get more than 10 records? Upgrade to a paid plan. Free users get a 10-record preview.

🟦 What export formats are supported? CSV, Excel (XLSX), JSON, XML, RSS, and HTML from the dataset page.

🟦 Does this respect rate limits? Yes. The actor uses a single sequential pagination loop.

🟦 Will field names change? Field names are pinned to source API column names. If the source changes column IDs you may need an updated actor build.

🟦 Can I use this commercially? The source data is public-domain government information. Always re-read the source's terms of use for your specific commercial application.

🟦 What about privacy? This actor only returns data the agency has chosen to publish to the open-data portal. Records the agency suppresses are not included.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Make · Zapier · Slack · Airbyte · GitHub Actions · Google Drive · Webhooks · REST API · n8n · Pipedream · Bubble · Retool · Power Automate · Airtable · Notion.

🔗 Recommended Actors

Actor	What it does
NYC Restaurant Inspections	NYC DOHMH grades and violations
Chicago Food Inspections	Chicago Department of Public Health results
LA Business Licenses	LA City active business registry
NYC DCWP Business Licenses	Every NYC consumer-protection licensed business
Chicago 311 Service Requests	All Chicago non-emergency complaints

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with LA Business Licenses or its publishing agency. Only publicly available data is collected.