RegistryRadar
Developer API

Registry data, with its limits stated.

The same records and research that power the RegistryRadar app, available as a JSON API. Live records from the official US registries we ingest, plus a researched atlas of who publishes a registry, who operates it, and how an ordinary person checks — in 176 countries.

Free tier: 1,000 calls a month, no payment method required.

What we actually cover

We do not cover all fifty states, and no result from this API should be read as a clean bill of health. Where we hold nothing, the API says so explicitly rather than returning an empty list and leaving you to guess what it means.

45KLive recordsfrom ingested US sources
14US states & territorieswith at least one live source
23Live sourcesofficial registries
176Countries in the atlaslegal position, cited

Record counts last refreshed Aug 27, 2026, 7:44 AM. They change as sources are ingested — query /v1/stats for the current value rather than caching this page.

Live US records

We ingest the official state registries that publish openly, and only those. Every record carries the jurisdiction it came from and, where the registry publishes one, a link back to the entry so you can verify it at source. States we have not integrated return nothing — that gap is ours, not the government's: federal law requires every US jurisdiction to run a public registry.

A 176-country atlas

For each country: whether a registry exists, whether the public can search it, the operating body, the official name of the register, and how an ordinary person checks. Entries carry a citation and a verification date. A country we have not established is marked unverified — never as clear.

Per-jurisdiction detail

All 56 US registries — 50 states, DC and the five territories — with the tiering system, what the public site discloses about location, and whether juveniles are included. What a state publishes is not what a state knows, and the atlas records the former.

152 tribal registries
Under SORNA a federally recognised tribe can act as a registration jurisdiction in its own right; 152 do. Of those, 123 publish their own public search, separate from the registry of the surrounding state — so querying that state tells you nothing about those lands. The atlas records which is which, and where the remainder route their searches instead.
Safeguarding and vetting schemes
Most countries have no browsable register at all, and the real answer there is a vetting scheme: 29 countries issue a child-specific certificate for work with minors, and 23 maintain a barred list. A country with no registry is not an empty entry — it is a record of what that country does instead.

Who may reuse registry data, state by state

We read the governing statute or the registry's own terms for all 56 US registration jurisdictions: 6 permit reuse for any lawful purpose, 42 restrict it, 7 we serve nothing from at all, and 1 we could not establish and therefore treat as most-restrictive. Those are four different things, and the difference is why a national background-check product built on registry data cannot lawfully exist as one product. The full table, with a citation for every jurisdiction, is on the datasets page, and your own key's position is at /v1/api/policy.

What the API gives you

01

Records by place

Radius queries around a coordinate, or a bounding box for a whole visible region. Filter by risk level and jurisdiction. Server-side clustering is available for wide zooms so a country-wide view does not mean a country-wide download.

02

Coverage you can branch on

A coverage endpoint returns the geographic footprint of every source we hold. Check it before you render, so your own users see "no data for this area" instead of a blank map that reads as an all-clear.

03

The legal picture

The atlas answers the question a record search cannot: what is knowable here at all. Country level, then a drill-down to regions, with each entry's status backed by a citation.

Who it is for

Five things people build with it. If your use is none of these, the free tier exists so you can find out whether it fits before speaking to anyone.

Background screening
Add a registry check to an existing screening pipeline, and get back the jurisdiction and source URL alongside the match so an analyst can verify it against the state's own site.
Property management
Screen applicants and check the area around a listing. Bounding-box and radius queries return what a given registry publishes for that area — including, where that is nothing, an explicit statement that it is nothing.
Dating and marketplace trust & safety
Run a check at signup or before an in-person meet. Rate limits are sized for interactive request volumes rather than batch sweeps.
Journalism
The atlas is the part most journalists use: what each country's register actually is, who operates it, and whether an ordinary person can search it — each entry cited and dated.
Research
Compare disclosure regimes across jurisdictions without hand-collecting statutes. Published registrant totals carry the publisher's own scope and date, and are absent where no figure is published.

What this API is not

Registry data carries legal obligations, and the ones that matter are worth reading before you integrate rather than after. These are conditions of use, not fine print.

  • Not a consumer report. It is not FCRA-compliant and must not be used for eligibility decisions on employment, housing, credit or insurance.
  • Not a complete national picture, and an empty response is not an all-clear.
  • Not a substitute for the originating registry, which remains authoritative for its own records.
  • Not for harassment. Using registry data to threaten or harm anyone is a crime, and we terminate keys used that way.

Start on the free tier

A thousand calls a month, no payment method, the same data as every paid plan. Enough to find out whether we cover what you need.