Microproduct data guideintermediate

Regulations.gov Dockets

Federal rulemaking dockets, documents, and public comments for building comment-period monitors and agency docket trackers.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Intermediate — some data preparation helps
Size
Small · ≤0.2 GB
Formats
JSON
Access
API
API key
Required
Provider
U.S. General Services Administration
Updates
Daily
Data terms
Regulations.gov API terms of service

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

The regulations.gov v4 API searches dockets and documents with an api.data.gov key. Start with one agency and posted documents. Comment text is public input, not agency policy, and bulk comment jobs have separate rate limits.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • A free api.data.gov key saved in the DATA_GOV_API_KEY environment variable
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Register for a free api.data.gov key and save it in DATA_GOV_API_KEY.
  2. 2.Read the v4 documents search parameters.
  3. 3.Request a bounded page of EPA proposed rules.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import os
import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.regulations.gov/v4/documents",
    params={
        "api_key": os.environ["DATA_GOV_API_KEY"],
        "filter[agencyId]": "EPA",
        "filter[documentType]": "Proposed Rule",
        "page[size]": 20,
        "sort": "-postedDate",
    },
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
documents = pd.json_normalize(response.json()["data"])
documents["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(documents.head())
4

Test a useful signal

Track recent EPA proposed rules

Test whether v4 document search can power a bounded comment-period monitor.

  1. 01Keep document id, title, posted date, and comment-end date from the page.
  2. 02Flag documents whose comment period is still open.
  3. 03Explain that comments are public submissions and that the API is not the signed final rule.

Dataset details

U.S. General Services Administration is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: federal dockets and comments available through regulations.gov.

Theme

Government & Policy

Domains

RegulationPublic PolicyLegislation

Data types

DocumentsEvent DataTabular

Tasks

Rulemaking MonitoringComment AnalysisAlerting

Geography

United States

Formats

JSON

Provider

U.S. General Services Administration

Data terms

Regulations.gov API terms of service