eCFR Regulations Scraper — Codified Federal Rules

What this Actor scrapes

The eCFR (ecfr.gov, National Archives) is the codified, currently-in-force text of US federal regulations — Title > Chapter > Part > Subpart > Section. Give this Actor a bounded list of {title, part} pairs and it fetches each part's official XML, walks every section, and returns one clean row per section: a well-formed citation like "29 CFR 570.1", its heading, and the full verbatim body text. This is not a change feed — for "what changed today" in the Federal Register's daily journal of rulemaking, see our Federal Register Scraper. This Actor answers a different question: "what is the rule right now, verbatim."

What we handle for you

• 📄 Section-level parsing — the GPO XML nests sections inside subject groups and part wrappers; we walk every SECTION node regardless of nesting and give you one flat row per provision.
• 📅 Date resolution — omit a date and we look up the latest in-force date for that title automatically, instead of you guessing a valid one.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 and honour Retry-After. Up to 5 attempts per request.
• 🧊 We keep the dataset clean — Pydantic-validated rows, a regex-checked citation on every section, ISO-8601 timestamps.
• 💰 You pay only for results that land. No data → no charge (only the small actor-start warm-up fee).

Use cases

• Pull the verbatim text of a regulation for a compliance checklist or GRC platform.
• Feed a legal-ops search index with clean, citation-tagged section text.
• Snapshot a Part's in-force text on a given date for an audit trail.
• Monitor a handful of Parts your industry cares about without downloading an entire Title.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "targets": [
    {
      "title": 1,
      "part": "1"
    }
  ],
  "asOfDate": null
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

citationtitle_numbertitle_namepartsection_identifierheadingbody_textas_of_datescraped_at

{
  "citation": "1 CFR 1.1",
  "title_number": 1,
  "title_name": "General Provisions",
  "part": "1",
  "section_identifier": "1.1",
  "heading": "\u00a7 1.1 Definitions.",
  "body_text": "As used in this chapter, unless the context requires otherwise\u2014\n\nAdministrative Committee means...",
  "as_of_date": "2026-08-28",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-01T00:00:00Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Whole-title fetches are not supported by design — a single Part can already be tens of megabytes (Title 40 Part 60 alone is over 14 MB / 1,830 sections), so the Actor bounds every run to the Parts you name.
• One asOfDate per run — point-in-time diffing across two dates isn't a supported mode.
• Amendment/version history and agency metadata aren't included — this Actor returns the in-force text as it stands on the resolved date, not a change history.