Federal Register API (public inspection)
planned Executive · Tier 1 · API · National Archives / Office of the Federal Register
Official site (opens in a new tab) · All sources
What this source is
The Office of the Federal Register's own REST API serves every FR document as structured JSON — and, uniquely, public-inspection documents: rules, notices, and presidential documents filed for public inspection before their publication day. The earliest official, structured channel for executive orders and major rules.
Identity and registry record
- Registry id
federal-register-api- Agency / parent organization
- National Archives / Office of the Federal Register
- Branch
- executive
- Type
- API
- Status
- planned
- Tier
- 1
- URL (home)
- https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/documentation/api/v1 (opens in a new tab)
- URL (index)
- https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/public-inspection-documents.json (opens in a new tab)
- Registered
- 2026-07-28
- Registry notes
- Keyless, officially documented. The site's own bot-gate page (unblock.federalregister.gov) explicitly directs automated visitors to the API — the sanctioned channel. Complements govinfo-fr (which sees documents only on publication day); does not duplicate it. Exact rate-limit terms unreadable to research fetchers; capture at probe.
How we ingest it
- Channel
- API
- Method
- Would delta-sync the public-inspection and documents endpoints (keyless JSON REST).
- Request budget
- the agency class: at most 1,500 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)
- Politeness
- robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded
- Capture and hash
- captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)
Ingestion health
Not ingested: the registry status of this source is planned.
Ingestion statistics
These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.
Not ingested: the registry status of this source is planned. Ingestion statistics are measured for active sources only.
All time
No requests to www.federalregister.gov are recorded in the request log.
Last 30 days, day by day
No requests and no items were recorded in the last 30 days, so there is nothing to chart.