Tools / Federal Register – Proposed Rules Scraper & Public Inspection

Federal Register – Proposed Rules Scraper & Public Inspection

Scrape the US Federal Register's official government API: final rules, proposed rules, notices and presidential documents. 37 flat fields incl. comment-close deadline, EO 12866 significance, RIN, docket IDs, CFR references and referencedCitations (auto-links a correction/extension/postponement document back to the original it amends), with cursor paging past the API's own 10,000-row wall. Optional watchLabel mode returns only documents published since your last run, so a schedule becomes a rule alert.

Run it

Pay-per-result on Apify, no FetchSmith account needed. Use your own Apify API token, or hit Run on the Store page with no token at all.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fetchsmith~federal-register-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?clean=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"agencies": ["Environmental Protection Agency"], "commentsOpenOnly": true, "documentTypes": ["RULE", "PRORULE"], "maxResults": 100}'

Returns the rows as JSON when the run finishes. A hosted FetchSmith API (one key, no Apify account, see API docs) is planned but not open yet.

Output fields

documentNumber type subtype title abstract action publicationDate effectiveOn commentsCloseOn signingDate datesText significant agencyNames agencySlugs parentAgencyNames docketIds regulationIdNumbers cfrReferences topics citation startPage endPage pageLength president executiveOrderNumber excerpt referencedCitations url pdfUrl fullTextUrl jsonUrl filedAt filingType lastPublicInspectionIssue numPages editorialNote onPublicInspection

Sample output

{
  "agencyNames": [
    "Environmental Protection Agency"
  ],
  "cfrReferences": [
    "40 CFR 257"
  ],
  "citation": "91 FR 57842",
  "commentsCloseOn": "2026-11-10",
  "docketIds": [
    "EPA-HQ-OLEM-2026-4324",
    "FRL-13374-01-OLEM"
  ],
  "documentNumber": "2026-18552",
  "fullTextUrl": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/text/2026/09/11/2026-18552.txt",
  "publicationDate": "2026-09-11",
  "title": "Wisconsin: Approval of State Coal Combustion Residuals Permit Program",
  "type": "Proposed Rule",
  "url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/11/2026-18552/wisconsin-approval-of-state-coal-combustion-residuals-permit-program"
}

Guides

The Federal Register tells you tomorrow's rules today — but only for 16 hours a day — The Public Inspection desk (federalregister.gov's /public-inspection-documents.json) publishes filed-but-not-yet-official documents 1-3 business days early. Verified live, one document read a full day before it existed on the official archive endpoint — and the desk has an undocumented daily blackout window a naive daily cron will misread as "nothing new."
The Federal Register API says it has 10,000 documents. It doesn't — and the fix is already in the response — Every US federal rule, proposed rule and notice since 1994 is free JSON with no API key. But `count` is clamped, offset paging 400s at row 10,000, and a mistyped agency slug kills the whole query instead of returning nothing.

Only publicly accessible pages are read. Respect the source site's terms when using the data.