Craigslist Scraper

Craigslist Scraper: listings by city, category and keyword, no API key

Give it a city, a category and something to search for. You get rows with the listing id, title, price, posted time, neighbourhood, coordinates, image links and the listing URL. Switch on full posting text and each row also carries the seller's body text and the attribute table.

Craigslist has no nationwide index. Every city is its own site, so one search covers one city. You can list several cities in one run, and each one is searched separately.

🔍 What Craigslist Scraper does

It runs the search Craigslist's own filter bar would run, and hands you the results as structured rows instead of a page you have to read. Price bounds, owner or dealer, photos only, titles only, posted today, and a postal code with a radius are all there.

City names are forgiving. newyork, new york city, sfbay and london all resolve, and 707 Craigslist sites across 79 countries are recognised. If you would rather not think about abbreviations at all, paste a Craigslist search URL into searchUrls and whatever filters are already in it are kept.

Rows are written at the end of the run rather than as they are found, so keep maxItems at a size the run can finish.

📥 What you give it

{
  "city": ["sfbay"],
  "query": "toyota tacoma",
  "category": "cta",
  "maxItems": 500,
  "maxPrice": 25000
}

📤 What you get back

A real row, with the image list cut short:

{
  "listingId": "7959183765",
  "title": "Dutch Gazelle Tour Populair C8, 61CM, In storage, like NEW IMPORT",
  "price": 850,
  "priceText": "$850",
  "currency": "USD",
  "url": "https://www.craigslist.org/view/d/long-island-city-dutch-gazelle-tour/fRrdPyQukG7jW8afcTduEd",
  "postedAt": "2026-09-14T05:37:44.000Z",
  "categoryId": 68,
  "categoryAbbr": "bik",
  "categoryName": "bicycles - by owner",
  "location": "LIC",
  "neighborhood": null,
  "subarea": "que",
  "city": "newyork",
  "cityName": "new york city",
  "region": "NY",
  "country": "US",
  "latitude": 40.7446,
  "longitude": -73.9345,
  "images": ["https://images.craigslist.org/00L0L_2mdiEek2CdR_0dI07I_600x450.jpg", "..."],
  "imageCount": 9,
  "searchUrl": "https://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=bike",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T05:42:36.888Z"
}

With Fetch full posting text on, five more fields land on the same row: description (the seller's body text), attributes (the labelled table, so condition and odometer on a car, rent period on a rental, frame size on a bike), attributeTags (the unlabelled chips like 1BR / 1Ba), updatedAt and address. A posting that disappeared between the search and the detail fetch keeps its search fields and gains a detailError.

🧾 Reading the output

charged: false is the marker on the rows that are not listings. A real listing row does not carry the field at all, so filter on _sample and _diagnostic being absent.

Every diagnostic carries a hint in plain words, and one failed search never stops the others.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Craigslist Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put your city into City and what you want into Search terms. 3. Set Category. sss covers everything for sale and is a fine starting point. 4. Set Maximum listings, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.85 per 1,000 listings. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per listing row. Turning on full posting text does not add a second charge, it just adds fields to the same row. The sample row is not charged, diagnostic rows are not charged, and a listing id seen twice in one run only becomes one row.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching a city and category on a schedule and diffing on listingId, so you see what went up

since yesterday without reloading a page.

• Pulling every car under a price in one metro, with attributes on, so odometer and title status

arrive as columns rather than as paragraphs.

• Rental research: hhh or apa with a postal code and a radius, then reading attributeTags for

bedroom counts and square footage.

• Finding dealer postings hiding in an owner category, or the reverse, using sellerType.
• Mapping what is for sale where, because every row carries coordinates.

🚧 What it does not do

• One city per search. There is no nationwide Craigslist index. List several cities and each is

searched on its own.

• Relevance sorting stops at 360 results. Craigslist's cap, not a setting here. newest has no

such limit, which is why it is the default.

• No sorting by price. Craigslist no longer offers it. Sort the dataset yourself.
• No seller contact details. No phone number, no email, no reply-to address. Craigslist keeps

those behind its own relay.

• neighborhood is usually null. Craigslist only assigns neighbourhoods in a few dense metros.

location is the field to rely on.

• Cross-posts are separate rows. The same couch posted to three subareas is three postings with

three ids, and Craigslist reports them separately.

• Rows land at the end of the run, so a run that hits its time limit writes nothing. Full posting

text roughly doubles the work, so pick maxItems with that in mind.

• Postings expire and get deleted. scrapedAt records when the row was read.

🧭 Which listings scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Craigslist account? No. Nothing to log into and no key to apply for.

Can I search the whole country at once? No, and neither can Craigslist. Pass a list of cities instead.

Why did I only get 360 results? You used relevance sorting. Switch Sort to newest first.

Can I get the seller's phone or email? No. Craigslist hides them behind its own relay, so they are not on the page to read.

Is price missing a lot? In job, gig and community categories, yes, because those postings have no price. For-sale postings where the seller left it blank also come back null.

Can I schedule it? Yes. Keep listingId as your key and each run tells you what is new.

Is scraping Craigslist legal? These are public postings, and they can contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Check Craigslist's terms too. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the city, the category and the run ID. If you got a diagnostic row, its errorCode and hint usually name the problem on their own.