22 Free Public Data Sources to Scrape for B2B Prospect Lists

Why these files are worth scraping

A contact database can tell you a company's size and industry, while a registry can tell you what the company does, because the company had to report it.

Every source below is free and comes from a government body or a regulator, and we've built real prospect lists from each one. For each source we note what's in it, who it reaches and what we ran into along the way.

Three things came up in almost every build:

A registration doesn't prove a business is still open, so we only trust a record that carries a recent date, such as a filing year or a current permit.
Government files almost never include a website, which makes finding the company's domain the slowest part of the job. In one test on healthcare practice names, loose name matching was right only about 30% of the time.
The detail on the record is often worth more than the company name. A recall notice or a new permit gives us a reason to write to someone, and a name on its own doesn't.

Trucking and fleets

FMCSA Motor Carrier Census

US Department of Transportation · free API, no key

What's in it: A verified truck count for every registered carrier, along with the owner's name, a phone number and an email for about 84% of carriers. Cargo flags show what each carrier hauls.
Who it reaches: Companies buying fleet tracking, freight software and packaging supplies. One of our pulls returned 41,142 active carriers running 10 to 49 trucks that haul construction supplies, building materials, logs, utilities equipment or machinery.
What we ran into: We build the list from this file and don't try to match an existing list against it. When we tried matching a list of trades companies, only 16% were found, because most trades vans don't have to register. We also filter to carriers that filed since 2024, since a truck count is only as fresh as the last filing. About 40% of the emails are personal addresses.

FMCSA crash and inspection files

US Department of Transportation · free API

What's in it: Dated crashes, inspections and out-of-service orders for each carrier.
Who it reaches: Fleet safety and tracking buyers, where a recent event gives us a reason to get in touch. One run found 702 fleets with an out-of-service event in the past 12 months.
What we ran into: We join these to the census by the carrier's DOT number.

Healthcare

NPI Registry (NPPES)

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · free API and monthly bulk file

What's in it: Every provider and practice in the US, with the practice address, phone, specialty codes and a named authorized official with a title.
Who it reaches: Software buyers at dental, vision and specialty practices, urgent care groups and medical equipment suppliers. The address field let us count how many locations a group has.
What we ran into: We count locations by distinct street address, because one urgent care brand turned out to be filed under 28 legal entities. The file has no website field, and guessing sites from search results created 103 fake accounts in one of our builds. We now check that each matched page belongs to a practice before we keep it.

CMS home health, hospice and nursing home ownership files

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · free download

What's in it: Every owner of each agency, with their ownership share, the date they were added, and flags for private equity and chain ownership.
Who it reaches: Operators running several home health or hospice agencies, and agencies that changed hands recently.
What we ran into: The file moves to a new web address every quarter. We also learned that when every owner on an agency is recent, it's a new agency and not a sale.

CMS Care Compare

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · free download

What's in it: Nursing home chains as CMS groups them, with bed counts and staff turnover rates.
Who it reaches: Workforce and retention software buyers at nursing home chains, where we used staff turnover above 50% as the signal.
What we ran into: The counts only include Medicare-certified sites, so some operators look smaller than they are.

CMS medical equipment supplier files

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · free API

What's in it: Every supplier that billed Medicare for equipment, with patient counts, claim totals and the product codes they billed.
Who it reaches: Billing and paperwork software buyers at equipment suppliers, sorted by what they sell.
What we ran into: The totals cover traditional Medicare only, so we never describe them as a supplier's revenue. The site also blocks visitors from outside the US.

Life sciences

ClinicalTrials.gov

US National Library of Medicine · free API, no key

What's in it: The sponsor, phase, start date and status of every registered trial, and the stated reason when a trial stops.
Who it reaches: Small biotechs entering their first human trials. One pull found 2,125 early-phase industry trials in our target regions posted since January 2025.
What we ran into: Matching sponsor names to companies was wrong 24% of the time for us, because so many company names look alike. We also read 50 stopped trials by hand, and only 6 of them had stopped for safety or results.

NIH RePORTER and SBIR award data

National Institutes of Health and the Small Business Administration · free API and bulk file

What's in it: Grant abstracts that state a company's research stage, with the award size and date. The SBIR file has a company website on 56% of its health rows.
Who it reaches: Grant-funded biotechs at a named stage, and research hospitals by how much grant activity they have.
What we ran into: The SBIR API was down when we used it, so we worked from the bulk file.

SEC Form D filings

US Securities and Exchange Commission · free bulk file

What's in it: Private fundraising rounds, with the filing date, the amount offered and the amount sold.
Who it reaches: Companies that raised money in the past 12 months, and newly formed investment funds.
What we ran into: The download address we started with no longer worked, and most filers list no industry code and no website.

SAM.gov entity registry

US General Services Administration · free monthly file

What's in it: A website that the company registered with the government, which was present on 65% to 81% of the life science records we pulled, plus industry codes.
Who it reaches: We've used it across almost every industry, and it's also the best free way we've found to turn a company name into a website. It was right 98% of the time when it found a match.
What we ran into: Our API key allows about 10 calls a day, so we work from the monthly file, and we leave the contact columns alone.

Financial services

SEC Form ADV

US Securities and Exchange Commission · free bulk file

What's in it: Assets managed, types of clients, staff counts and ownership for every registered investment adviser. The September 2026 file held 14,691 US advisers.
Who it reaches: Investment managers of a set size and client type. Comparing two files a year apart showed us which firms were growing.
What we ran into: The written description of a firm's strategy sits in a second document that is harder to fetch, and searching it by keyword didn't work for us. We treat adviser growth above 45% as a likely merger or filing change.

State insurance and workers' compensation rosters

State regulators, including Texas, California, New York, Florida and Michigan · free

What's in it: Which insurers are filing commercial rates, and which firms administer claims for self-insured employers.
Who it reaches: Claims software buyers at insurers and claims administrators.
What we ran into: The legal entities have to be grouped into the insurance groups that own them. In Texas, 776 entities came down to 239 groups.

Manufacturing and industrial sites

OSHA injury reporting data

US Department of Labor · free bulk file

What's in it: A street address, an industry code and an exact employee count for 383,283 US work sites. A filing for the current year tells us the site is open.
Who it reaches: Manufacturers and warehouses, picked by size and location.
What we ran into: The file has no website, and small sites are missing from it, so the list leans toward larger companies.

EPA facility registries

US Environmental Protection Agency · free API

What's in it: Plant-level records with a county, a phone number and a public contact email, plus air, water and waste permits and any penalties.
Who it reaches: Companies buying environmental compliance software and industrial supplies, counted per parent company.
What we ran into: The toxics registry lists every facility registered since 1987. In one region, 75% of the rows hadn't filed since 2019, and 7 of the 10 we checked by hand were closed. We now filter on the last filing year every time.

State environmental permit registries

State agencies in nine states · free

What's in it: Air, stormwater, wastewater and hazardous waste permits, often for sites too small to appear on the federal lists. Florida's air registry even includes a shutdown date.
Who it reaches: Smaller manufacturers that the federal data misses.
What we ran into: We check the row count on every pull, because a registry that quietly returns a handful of rows looks the same as one that worked.

EIA Refinery Capacity Report and EPA water system data

US Energy Information Administration and EPA · free

What's in it: The capacity of every US refinery, and the population served by every water utility.
Who it reaches: Process control software buyers at refineries and large utilities.
What we ran into: Refineries have to be grouped by the corporation field to get the real operator. Searching a city's web domain returns every city department, so we filter job titles down to water and treatment roles.

Food, drink and restaurants

openFDA food recalls

US Food and Drug Administration · free API

What's in it: Every food recall, with its class, date and reason, such as an undeclared allergen or a wrong label.
Who it reaches: Food makers with a recent labeling recall. One pull found 2,963 recalls at 902 firms over 24 months.
What we ran into: Our first build used the file only to find companies and threw away the recall reason, which was the most useful part. We now keep the recall detail on each record, and we leave recalls involving illness out of our outreach.

USDA meat and poultry plant directory, and the organic database

US Department of Agriculture · free download

What's in it: Active meat and poultry plants with their location, and organic producers with a flag for companies that make products for other brands.
Who it reaches: Food manufacturers and contract makers.
What we ran into: We tested whether a long list of trade names on a plant meant it made products for other brands, and it didn't hold up. The names were brands the plant owned.

Food safety certification registers

SQF, BRCGS and FSSC 22000 · free lookups

What's in it: Certified plants, with the date each certificate expires.
Who it reaches: Food makers a few months before an audit is due.
What we ran into: The registers list plants and not companies, and one company had 17 of them. We match on the exact company name without filtering by state, because the state filter lost 46% of true matches.

State and city liquor licence filings

Alcohol regulators in California, Texas, New York, Oregon and several cities · free

What's in it: New licence applications, by address and date.
Who it reaches: Restaurant groups opening a new location. One pull of 18,492 filings matched 267 groups.
What we ran into: Airport operators license brands they don't own, which creates false matches. Checking each group's own website for coming-soon pages found about twice as many openings.

Education and real estate

IPEDS

US Department of Education · free download

What's in it: Enrollment, admit rate, yield and international student share for every US college, with the change from year to year.
Who it reaches: Universities whose international enrollment or yield is falling.
What we ran into: The files use an old text encoding, and some column values carry a leading space that breaks filters.

Professional licence registers

Regulators such as Ontario's real estate council and the Texas licensing department · free lookups

What's in it: Who holds a licence, which firm they work for and how many licence holders each firm has.
Who it reaches: Real estate brokerages by agent count, and electrical and air conditioning contractors.
What we ran into: The counts can differ from what a company reports about itself, so we only quote a count when the register and the company's own figure are within about 15% of each other.

How we put this list together

We used every source here to build a prospect list between January and November 2026. The record counts and match rates come from our own builds, so they'll differ for other filters and regions.

All of these sources are published for public use. We left out private directories whose terms don't allow it.
Markets are described in general terms, and no client is identified.
Access details change, so it's worth checking each publisher's site for the current address and limits.

Numbers to go with it

For the reply and bounce rates from campaigns these lists fed, see our 2026 cold email statistics.

Public data sources you can scrape and sell into