USAJOBS API: the developer’s guide

The short answer

The USAJOBS API is the official REST API for USAJOBS, the U.S. federal government’s hiring site, operated by the Office of Personnel Management. It is public, free, and self-serve: register for a key at developer.usajobs.gov, call data.usajobs.gov/api/search, and you get current federal job announcements back as JSON.

If you have read our guides on the Google Jobs API or the LinkedIn Jobs API, you know the usual punchline: the API you searched for does not exist, or you cannot have it. USAJOBS is the rare opposite case. The API exists, it is official, and anyone can use it. The catch is scope, not access - it covers federal government positions only.

What the USAJOBS API covers

USAJOBS is the front door for competitive-service federal hiring, which means the API sees the job announcements of essentially every major federal agency and department - plus excepted-service and legislative postings that agencies choose to list. In practice that is tens of thousands of open announcements at any moment.

Each announcement is unusually well structured:

• Structured salary, always. Federal pay is scale-based (GS grades and equivalents), so announcements carry real minimum and maximum remuneration figures instead of free-text ranges.
• Agency and organization hierarchy. Every posting maps to a department and sub-agency through stable organization codes.
• Occupational series. Federal roles are classified by a numeric series taxonomy (2210 is IT management, 0343 is management analysis), which makes category filtering more reliable than keyword matching.
• Hiring paths and dates. Open-to-public versus veterans versus students, plus explicit open and close dates for every announcement.

For labor-market researchers, policy analysts, and anyone building tools around government hiring, this is the cleanest single jobs feed in the United States.

Getting an API key

Request a key at developer.usajobs.gov/apirequest. You register an email address and receive an authorization key by return. Every request then needs three headers:

• Host: data.usajobs.gov
• User-Agent - the email address you registered with, not a browser string.
• Authorization-Key - the key you were issued.

The User-Agent convention trips people up because it inverts the usual meaning of the header. If you get authorization errors with a valid key, this is almost always why.

The search endpoint

The workhorse is GET /api/search. A minimal query looks like this:

curl "https://data.usajobs.gov/api/search?Keyword=data+engineer&LocationName=Washington,+DC&ResultsPerPage=100" \
  -H "Host: data.usajobs.gov" \
  -H "User-Agent: you@example.com" \
  -H "Authorization-Key: $USAJOBS_KEY"

The parameters you will actually use: Keyword, PositionTitle, LocationName, Organization (agency codes), JobCategoryCode (occupational series), RemunerationMinimumAmount, and DatePosted. Results come back under SearchResult.SearchResultItems with the full announcement in each item’s MatchedObjectDescriptor.

Paging works through ResultsPerPage (up to 500) and Page. For anything beyond a one-off query, treat the API as a snapshot source: poll on a schedule, key announcements by their control number, and diff against your previous crawl to detect new and closed postings. The API serves current openings only, so history is whatever you accumulate yourself.

Codelist endpoints

Alongside search, the API publishes codelists - the reference taxonomies the announcements are classified with. The two you will reach for first are the agency subelements list (every department and sub-agency with its organization code) and the occupational series list. Fetch them once, cache them, and use the codes for filtering rather than fragile keyword matches on agency names.

Where it runs out

The USAJOBS API is excellent at its job, and its job is narrow. Three boundaries to plan around:

• Federal only. No state or municipal government roles, and no private sector. USAJOBS is one employer domain - a big one, but one.
• Current openings only. Closed announcements leave the search index. Longitudinal datasets require your own snapshot pipeline.
• Query-shaped access. There is no firehose or webhook. Freshness is bounded by how often you poll and how you enumerate queries.

Beyond federal jobs

Most products that need federal jobs data need private-sector data too - a job board that covers the whole market, a compensation tool comparing government and industry pay, a sourcing product that does not stop at agency walls. The private-sector half of that picture does not have an official API. It lives on tens of thousands of company career sites run by ATS platforms: Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, and their peers.

That is the layer JobsPipe covers. One API reads 30+ ATS and job-board sources and returns postings in a single normalized schema - structured salary, resolved locations, deduplication across mirrored postings, and webhooks for new listings. Pair it with the official USAJOBS API and you cover both halves of the U.S. labor market with two integrations, each reading from its original source.