Office of the Federal Register API

Use in your agent

Load recent Federal Register documents into Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 2, 2026.

Access

• No account or key. The public document-search endpoint returns JSON or CSV.
• Use date and agency filters to divide long searches; each response page is capped at 1,000 documents.

Request

curl 'https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json?per_page=25&order=newest&conditions%5Bpublication_date%5D%5Bgte%5D=2026-10-19'

Format

JSON with a result count, pagination metadata and document records containing identifiers, titles, types, agencies, abstracts, publication dates and provider links.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""Recent Federal Register documents -> pandas -> Parquet. No key."""
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json"
params = {
    "per_page": 25,
    "order": "newest",
    "conditions[publication_date][gte]": "2026-10-19",
}
response = requests.get(URL, params=params, timeout=60)
response.raise_for_status()
payload = response.json()
df = pd.DataFrame(payload["results"])
df["publication_date"] = pd.to_datetime(df["publication_date"])
df.to_parquet("federal_register_recent.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "documents", df["publication_date"].min().date().isoformat(), "to",
      df["publication_date"].max().date().isoformat(), "of", payload["count"], "matches")

Run by us on 2026-11-02 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 25 documents 2026-11-02 to 2026-11-02 of 1076 matches

Limits

• Rate limit: Not stated.
• Document search pages are limited to 1,000 records.
• The document-search endpoint covers publications since 1994.

Quirks

• Publication date, signing date, effective date and comment-close date describe different stages; preserve each populated field.
• The API site is an unofficial edition. Keep official PDF and XML links with the metadata when the underlying text matters.
• Corrections and related documents can appear after first publication, so retain document numbers and retrieval time for refreshes.

Terms and attribution

• The API pages do not state a dataset-wide SPDX licence.
• Federal websites can contain protected third-party material, trademarks and logos even when the underlying federal work is not copyright-protected.

Sources

• https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documentation.json: “Search all Federal Register documents published since 1994.”
• https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documentation.json: “How many documents to return at once; 1000 maximum.”
• https://www.usa.gov/government-copyright: “Not everything that appears on a federal government website is a government work.”