Federal Register Rule & Notice Monitor – Regulatory Change API

A Federal Register API wrapper and regulatory-change monitor that pulls proposed and final rules, notices and presidential documents and normalizes each into a clean record: title, agency, document type, abstract, action, publication/effective dates, comment deadline and docket IDs. Use it to build a regulatory-tracking tool, a compliance early-warning system, or a policy-intelligence feed by agency or topic.

Who uses it

Regulatory-affairs and compliance teams, law firms, government-affairs and policy-intelligence firms, trade associations, and GovTech products.

Why this is worth charging for

Missing a comment deadline or a new rule affecting your industry is a real cost. The Federal Register API is excellent but returns verbose documents and paginates; this actor normalizes it into a deduplicated, topic- or agency-scoped feed with the dates that matter (effective, comments-close) surfaced, ready to schedule.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "documentNumber": "2024-12345",
  "title": "Air Quality Standards",
  "type": "Proposed Rule",
  "abstract": "The EPA proposes...",
  "action": "Proposed rule.",
  "agencies": [
    "Environmental Protection Agency"
  ],
  "publicationDate": "2024-05-01",
  "commentsCloseDate": "2024-07-01",
  "docketIds": [
    "EPA-HQ-OAR-2024-0001"
  ],
  "significant": true,
  "htmlUrl": "https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-12345",
  "source": "Federal Register"
}

Input

Field	Description
term	Full-text term, e.g. 'per- and polyfluoroalkyl' or an industry keyword.
documentType	Restrict to one document type.
agencySlug	Agency slug, e.g. environmental-protection-agency.
publishedFrom	Only include documents published on or after this date.
perPage	Results per page (max 1000).
maxPagesToScan	Pages per run.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.01, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• document-record — $0.01 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

A daily topic/agency monitor returns a handful of new documents, costing pennies. Broad historical pulls scale with pages scanned.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official federalregister.gov/api/v1 service. No API key or proxies required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Is there an API for the Federal Register?

Yes — this actor wraps it and returns clean, deduplicated document records with the key regulatory dates surfaced, via the Apify API, webhook or export.

Can I watch one agency?

Yes. Set agencySlug (and/or a term) and schedule with onlyNewSinceLastRun for agency-specific regulatory alerts.

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