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US Regulations Have a Free JSON API — Every Rule, Notice and Executive Order Without Scraping

#api #government #webscraping #data

US Regulations Have a Free JSON API

If you need US federal regulations as data — final rules, proposed rules, public notices, executive orders — you do not need to scrape, and you do not need a paid API. The Federal Register (the daily journal of the US government) publishes everything as clean JSON through a free, keyless API.

No sign-up. No API key. No token. The only limit is a polite rate cap.

The base 

https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1
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Pull the latest documents 

curl "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json?per_page=5&order=newest"
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You get back count, total_pages, and a results array. Each result includes document_number, type (Rule / Proposed Rule / Notice / Presidential Document), title, abstract, publication_date, agencies, and direct html_url and pdf_url links to the official text.

Search by term, agency, date or type

The API takes conditions[...] filters:

# Everything mentioning "artificial intelligence"
curl "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json?conditions%5Bterm%5D=artificial+intelligence"

# Final rules from the EPA, published this year
curl "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json?conditions%5Btype%5D%5B%5D=RULE&conditions%5Bagencies%5D%5B%5D=environmental-protection-agency&conditions%5Bpublication_date%5D%5Bgte%5D=2026-01-01"
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At the time of writing, the plain artificial intelligence term search returns 1,504 documents — all as structured JSON.

Every rule, notice and executive order as JSON

Fetch one document in full 

curl "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents/2026-14454.json"
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That returns the full record for a single document number, including the abstract, the list of affected CFR parts, docket IDs, and links to the raw text (body_html_url, full_text_xml_url).

List every agency 

curl "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/agencies.json"
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472 agencies, each with its slug (use it in the conditions[agencies][] filter above).

The only two rules

  1. Be reasonable with request volume — it's a public-good API, not a firehose to hammer.
  2. Page with per_page (max 1000) and page, or use order=newest for a rolling feed.

That's the whole thing. For consolidated regulations already in force (as opposed to the daily journal of changes), pair this with the sibling eCFR API — same idea, also keyless.

If you'd rather skip the paging, the field-mapping and the retry logic, the Federal Register Scraper on Apify wraps exactly these endpoints — term/agency/type/date filters in, structured rows out.

📌 Full endpoint cheatsheet (copy-paste reference): github.com/noble-ronin/federal-register-api

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