Federal Register Scraper — U.S. Rules, Notices, Executive Orders & Regulations (No API Key)

▶️ Run the Federal Register Scraper on Apify »

One click, no setup — the hosted Actor turns the U.S. Federal Register into a clean, bulk-exportable dataset.

Extract documents from the U.S. Federal Register — the official journal of the U.S. federal government — by keyword, agency, document type or date range. This Federal Register scraper reads the official, keyless public government API and returns clean, structured rows for final rules, proposed rules, notices and presidential documents: title, abstract, publishing agencies, publication and effective dates, page length, official citation, and direct HTML + PDF links. There is no API key and no login, and one run can return up to 10,000 documents.

The Federal Register publishes 80,000+ documents a year and offers search but no bulk export — this Actor bridges that gap for compliance monitoring, legal and policy research, and regulatory intelligence. You only need a free Apify account.

This is a documentation & usage guide. The scraper itself runs on the Apify platform — open it here.

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📚 Table of contents

• What you get
• Use cases
• Quick start (4 ways)
• Input
• Output
• Integrations & automation
• Export formats
• FAQ
• Related actors

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🎁 What you get

One clean, flat row per document — every field:

Field	Description
documentNumber	Official Federal Register document number (unique id), e.g. 2024-28147
title	Full document title
type	RULE, PRORULE, NOTICE or PRESDOCU
abstract	Brief summary of the document
agencies	Comma-separated list of publishing agencies
publicationDate	Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD)
effectiveDate	Effective date (YYYY-MM-DD), where provided
pageLength	Number of pages the document spans in the Federal Register
htmlUrl	Link to the document on federalregister.gov
pdfUrl	Direct link to the official PDF
citation	Official Federal Register citation (e.g. 89 FR 12345)

• 📜 Every document type — Final Rules (legally binding), Proposed Rules (open for comment), Notices, and Presidential Documents (executive orders, proclamations).
• 🏛️ Filter by agency — EPA, FDA, DOT, OSHA, SEC, FTC, FCC, Treasury, DHS, DOJ and 30+ more built-in agency options.
• 🔎 Full-text keyword search — search across document text, stacked with agency / type / date filters.
• 📅 Date-range filtering — bound results to any dateFrom–dateTo window.
• 🔓 No API key / no login — public-domain government data; just a free Apify account.

💡 Use cases

• Compliance monitoring — track every final rule an agency publishes that affects your industry, on a schedule.
• Legal & policy research — monitor regulatory activity by topic and export official citations for briefs and memos.
• Comment-period tracking — surface proposed rules (NPRMs) open for public comment in your sector before deadlines pass.
• Executive-order & presidential-document tracking — pull PRESDOCU documents to follow executive actions as they publish.
• Journalism & watchdogs — cover federal policy with a live feed of rules and notices across agencies.
• Regulatory datasets for NLP/ML — build a clean, structured corpus of federal rulemaking for models and analytics.

🚀 Quick start (4 ways)

1. Apify Console (no code)

1. Open the Actor: apify.com/logiover/federal-register-scraper
2. Click Try for free.
3. Leave everything empty for the most recent documents, or add a query, pick agencies / types and set a date range, then click Start.
4. When the run finishes, open the Output tab and export to CSV / JSON / Excel.

2. Apify CLI

npm i -g apify-cli
apify login
apify call logiover/federal-register-scraper

3. API / curl (run sync, get dataset items)

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/logiover~federal-register-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "artificial intelligence",
    "maxResults": 500
  }'

4. apify-client (JavaScript & Python)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('logiover/federal-register-scraper').call({
    query: 'clean air',
    agencies: ['environmental-protection-agency'],
    types: ['RULE', 'PRORULE'],
    dateFrom: '2024-01-01',
    dateTo: '2024-12-31',
    maxResults: 500,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("logiover/federal-register-scraper").call(run_input={
    "query": "clean air",
    "agencies": ["environmental-protection-agency"],
    "types": ["RULE", "PRORULE"],
    "dateFrom": "2024-01-01",
    "dateTo": "2024-12-31",
    "maxResults": 500,
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

More end-to-end snippets: examples/cli.md · examples/api-curl.md · examples/javascript.md · examples/python.md

📥 Input

Everything is optional — leave it all empty to pull the most recent documents. Add a keyword, agency, type or date range to narrow the results.

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	—	Keyword or phrase to search across document text. Empty = browse the most recent documents.
types	array	[] (all)	Document types: RULE (Final Rule), PRORULE (Proposed Rule), NOTICE, PRESDOCU (Presidential Document).
agencies	array	[] (all)	Publishing-agency slugs, e.g. environmental-protection-agency, food-and-drug-administration, securities-and-exchange-commission, transportation-department.
order	enum	newest	newest, oldest, relevance or executive_order_number.
dateFrom	string	—	Only include documents published on/after this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
dateTo	string	—	Only include documents published on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
maxResults	integer	200	Max documents to return (1–10,000).
proxy	object	Apify Proxy	Proxy settings; automatic is recommended for this public government API.

Document types

Type	Meaning
RULE	Final Rules — legally binding regulations
PRORULE	Proposed Rules — open for public comment (NPRM)
NOTICE	Notices — announcements, meetings, grant awards
PRESDOCU	Presidential Documents — executive orders, proclamations

Example — all AI-related regulatory activity

{ "query": "artificial intelligence", "maxResults": 1000 }

Example — EPA & OSHA final rules in a date window (compliance monitoring)

{ "agencies": ["environmental-protection-agency", "occupational-safety-and-health-administration"], "types": ["RULE"], "dateFrom": "2024-10-01", "maxResults": 500 }

Example — proposed rules open for comment in your sector

{ "query": "financial services", "types": ["PRORULE"], "dateFrom": "2024-01-01", "maxResults": 200 }

Example — everything the SEC published this year

{ "agencies": ["securities-and-exchange-commission"], "dateFrom": "2024-01-01", "maxResults": 2000 }

📤 Output

One clean, flat row per document. Sample:

{
  "documentNumber": "2024-28147",
  "title": "Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework for Federal Agencies",
  "type": "NOTICE",
  "abstract": "This notice announces the availability of an updated risk management framework for artificial intelligence systems used in federal decision-making processes.",
  "agencies": "Office of Science and Technology Policy",
  "publicationDate": "2024-11-15",
  "effectiveDate": "",
  "pageLength": 8,
  "htmlUrl": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/11/15/2024-28147/artificial-intelligence-risk-management-framework",
  "pdfUrl": "https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2024-11-15/pdf/2024-28147.pdf",
  "citation": "89 FR 90512"
}

The default Overview dataset view shows document number, title, type, agencies, publication date, page length, citation and URL as a sortable table in the Apify UI.

🔌 Integrations & automation

• Schedules — get a daily feed of new rules and notices for your agencies or keywords on autopilot.
• Webhooks — fire on run finish to trigger compliance alerts or a database load.
• Google Sheets / Excel — push documents to a spreadsheet for a live regulatory tracker.
• Cloud storage — export to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or your data warehouse via the API.
• No-code automation — connect to Zapier, Make, n8n or Pipedream through Apify to build regulatory-monitoring workflows.

📁 Export formats

Every dataset can be downloaded or fetched via the API as JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), JSONL, XML or HTML.

❓ FAQ

Does this actor require an API key?

No. The Federal Register public API is a completely free, keyless U.S. government API with no authentication. You only need your Apify token to run the Actor itself.

Can I scrape the Federal Register without an API or login?

Yes. The Actor reads publicly available Federal Register documents with no login, account or token, and auto-paginates the full result set of your query.

What is the difference between RULE and PRORULE?

A RULE (Final Rule) is a legally binding regulation that has completed the rulemaking process. A PRORULE (Proposed Rule / NPRM) is a draft regulation open for public comment — not yet binding.

How do I filter by multiple agencies and types at once?

Pass multiple agency slugs in agencies and multiple codes in types in the same run. Multiple values of the same filter are treated as OR (any match); different filter types combine as AND (all must match).

How do I find the right agency slug?

Agency slugs are lowercase, hyphenated identifiers (e.g. food-and-drug-administration, transportation-department). The Actor's agencies dropdown lists the common ones; you can also check the URL of an agency page on federalregister.gov.

Can I get the full text of documents?

Each record includes the abstract plus htmlUrl and pdfUrl to the complete document. For bulk full-text extraction, combine this Actor with a web scraper pointed at those URLs.

How many results can I get per run?

Up to 10,000. The Actor paginates automatically until it hits your maxResults cap. For broad keyword searches like "regulation" there may be hundreds of thousands of matches — use maxResults and date filters to cap output.

How recent is the data?

Documents are typically available within 24 hours of publication. The Federal Register publishes on business days.

How do I export Federal Register data to CSV or Excel?

Run the Actor on any query, then download the results in CSV, Excel, JSON or XML — or pull them via the Apify API.

Is this legal to scrape?

Yes. All Federal Register content is in the public domain (U.S. government works are not subject to copyright), and the API is provided specifically for programmatic access. You are responsible for how you use and present the data.

🔗 Related actors

Building a legal, compliance or government-data pipeline? Pair the Federal Register scraper with these:

• SEC EDGAR Form D Scraper — 📄 U.S. private-placement filings with issuer and offering details.
• USAspending.gov Scraper — 💵 U.S. federal spending, awards and contracts.

👉 Browse all logiover actors on Apify Store — 180+ scrapers across real estate, jobs, crypto, social media & B2B data.

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📄 Documentation only — this repository contains no source code. The Actor runs on the Apify platform. ▶️ Run it: https://apify.com/logiover/federal-register-scraper

Licensed under the MIT License · © 2026 logiover