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Data.gov Catalog API (GSA v4)

Metadata search across hundreds of thousands of US government datasets

Data.gov is the U.S. federal open-data catalog. Its GSA v4 Catalog API lets you search and retrieve metadata for hundreds of thousands of datasets across federal agencies: titles, descriptions, organizations, keywords, and resource download URLs. It returns dataset metadata, not the underlying data files themselves. Access is via api.data.gov, so requests carry an X-Api-Key header (a shared DEMO_KEY works for testing).

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Free tier

Free; shared DEMO_KEY works, or a free api.data.gov key for production

Rate limits

DEMO_KEY: ~30 req/hour and 50 req/day per IP. Free api.data.gov key: typically ~1,000 req/hour. HTTP 429 on overage, auto-lifts after one hour

Auth

API key

Base URL

https://api.gsa.gov/technology/datagov/v4

What you'd build with it

Let an agent discover the right government dataset by keyword
Build a search-then-download pipeline over federal open data
Index dataset metadata for a RAG corpus of public data sources
Resolve resource (CSV/GeoJSON/API) download URLs programmatically

Key endpoints

GET/search?q={query}Search datasets by keyword (with filters/sorting)
GET/api/organizationsList publishing organizations (agencies)
GET/api/keywordsRetrieve commonly used keywords/tags
GET/harvest_record/{record_id}Fetch a single dataset's harvest-record metadata

Members

Members get the runnable recipe

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