Federal Register Crawler — US Rules, Regulations & Executive Orders

Crawls regulatory documents from the Federal Register, the daily journal of the US government. Returns rules, proposed rules, notices, and executive orders as clean JSON — with agency info, CFR references, RIN numbers, and public comment deadlines.

The Federal Register publishes everything the federal government does on paper: final rules, proposed rules, agency notices, and presidential documents. There are over 800,000 of them, going back decades. This crawler pulls them through the official Federal Register API — free, public, no key required — and hands you structured records instead of a search page.

Point it at a search term, an agency, a document type, or a date range. It paginates the rest.

What You Can Do With Federal Register Data

• Track rulemaking — follow a rule from proposed to final, with RIN numbers and regulations.gov docket IDs.
• Monitor an agency — pull every document from the EPA, Treasury, Commerce, or any agency by slug.
• Catch comment deadlines — comments_close_on tells you when the public comment window shuts.
• Watch executive orders — filter to presidential documents for executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations.
• Flag significant rules — return only economically significant rules (impact over $100M/year).
• Build a compliance feed — date-range queries make a clean daily or weekly pull.

Who Uses This

Compliance teams, regulatory analysts, policy researchers, law firms, lobbyists, and anyone who needs to know what a federal agency just published before it shows up in the news. Government-affairs shops use it to monitor dockets. RegTech products use it as a data source.

Input

Configure a run with any combination of these — leave them empty to crawl everything.

Field	What it does
searchTerm	Full-text search across all documents (e.g. tariff, artificial intelligence, climate).
documentType	Filter to Final Rules, Proposed Rules, Notices, or Presidential Documents.
agency	Agency slug, e.g. environmental-protection-agency, treasury-department.
dateFrom / dateTo	Publication date window (YYYY-MM-DD).
significant	Return only economically significant rules.
maxItems	Cap the result count. 0 means unlimited.

Output

Each document comes back as a structured record. The fields you actually need are there, plus a few you didn't know you wanted.

Field	Description
document_number	Federal Register document number (e.g. 2026-06599).
title	Document title.
abstract	Summary of the document.
type / subtype	Rule, Proposed Rule, Notice, Presidential Document — and Executive Order, Memorandum, Proclamation.
agencies / agency_names	Agencies involved.
publication_date / effective_on	When it published, when it takes effect.
cfr_references	Code of Federal Regulations references (Title X, Part Y).
regulation_id_number	RIN, for tracking through the rulemaking process.
docket_ids	Regulations.gov docket IDs for public comments.
significant	Whether the rule clears the $100M/year significance bar.
comments_close_on	Public comment deadline.
html_url / pdf_url	Links to the full document and its PDF.
topics / page_length / action	Subject topics, page count, and the regulatory action.

How It Works

1. You set the filters — search term, agency, document type, dates.
2. The crawler queries the official Federal Register v1 API and paginates through every match.
3. Each document is normalized into the schema above.
4. Results land in your dataset, ready to export as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

No authentication, no scraping fragile HTML — the Federal Register runs a real public API and this actor uses it.

FAQ

How do I scrape the Federal Register? Run this actor with a search term, agency, or date range. It calls the official Federal Register API and returns structured documents — no API key needed.

Is there a Federal Register API? Yes, and it's free and public. This crawler wraps it so you get clean, paginated, schema-normalized output instead of writing the pagination yourself.

Can I get executive orders only? Set documentType to Presidential Documents. The subtype field separates executive orders from memoranda and proclamations.

How do I track a specific rule's comment deadline? Every record carries comments_close_on and the regulations.gov docket_ids, so you can route straight to the comment page.

Need More Features?

Need extra fields, a different filter, or a scraper for another government source? File an issue or get in touch.

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Further reading: Government Data You Didn't Know Was Scrapable: 13 Federal Databases in One Toolkit