name: Department of Labor API FinOps
description: Financial operations guidance for consuming U.S. Department of Labor APIs
url: https://dataportal.dol.gov/
costModel:
  type: free
  description: >
    All U.S. Department of Labor APIs are provided free of charge as a public government service.
    Registration is free and API keys are provided at no cost. There are no paid tiers, premium
    plans, or usage-based billing. The DOL API is funded by taxpayers and made available to
    the public under open government data principles.

costDrivers:
  - name: API Key Registration
    cost: $0.00
    description: Free registration at dataportal.dol.gov provides authenticated API access
  - name: Dataset Access
    cost: $0.00
    description: All 200+ datasets available at no cost with a registered API key
  - name: Data Volume
    cost: $0.00
    description: No charges for data volume or number of records retrieved

budgetingGuidance:
  - consideration: Infrastructure Costs
    description: >
      While the DOL API itself is free, consumers should budget for their own infrastructure
      costs when building applications — hosting, compute, storage, and egress fees from
      cloud providers storing or processing DOL data.
  - consideration: Data Refresh Cadence
    description: >
      Plan polling frequency carefully; employment statistics and enforcement data are
      updated on varying schedules (monthly, quarterly, annually). Avoid excessive polling
      that could trigger undocumented rate limits.
  - consideration: Migration Risk
    description: >
      The legacy V1/V2 APIs were deactivated at end of 2024 in favor of APIv4 at
      dataportal.dol.gov. Budget time for migration when the API provider updates
      or deprecates endpoints. Monitor the changelog at developer.dol.gov/release-notes/.

openDataPolicy: true
governmentFunded: true
registrationUrl: https://dataportal.dol.gov/api-keys
changelogUrl: https://developer.dol.gov/release-notes/