Getting started

1. Get a key

If your organisation (an employer, developer, council, charity or training provider) has a verified account with us, sign in and open API access in your dashboard. Create a key there and it can read jobs (jobs:read) and Section 106 progress (s106:read) straight away. New keys start on the Evaluation allowance of 100 calls an hour and 10,000 a month.

Anonymous resident statistics (candidates:read) are requested on the same page with a short description of your purpose, and work once we approve them. The developer compliance export (compliance:read) is the one scope you cannot request yourself: our team sets it up. If your account is not verified yet, the API access page tells you how to verify it; no account at all, use the partnerships form.

A key is shown to you once. We keep only a one-way hash of it, so we cannot show it again: if you lose it, rotate it to get a new one. Store it as a secret, never in client-side code or a public repository.

2. Make a call

List the five newest live opportunities in Southwark:

curl -s "https://opportunityplatform.co.uk/api/v1/jobs?borough=southwark&limit=5" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OP_API_KEY"

Set OP_API_KEY in your shell first. A missing, unknown or revoked key returns 401 with error.code unauthorized. See Authentication.

3. Read the response

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "3f1a9c2e-5b41-4a7e-9c3d-1e2f4a6b8c0d",
      "title": "Site Carpenter",
      "type": "job",
      "location": "Bermondsey, London",
      "borough": "Southwark",
      "salary": "£38,000 - £44,000",
      "closingDate": "2027-03-31T00:00:00.000Z",
      "description": "Second-fix carpentry on a residential block.",
      "url": "https://opportunityplatform.co.uk/opportunities/site-carpenter-bermondsey"
    }
  ],
  "meta": { "returned": 1, "limit": 5, "next_cursor": null }
}

Three things worth knowing before you build on this:

• salary is free text, often Competitive. Do not parse it as a number without handling that.
• borough is returned as stored, so it may be a display name or a slug. Normalise before you compare.
• Send applicants to url. That is the public listing, and it is where the application is recorded against the place.

More than one page? Pass meta.next_cursor back as cursor; see Pagination.

Every response also carries your remaining allowance in X-RateLimit-* headers. See Rate limits and quotas.

Next

• Browse every endpoint and field in the API reference.
• Get told when something happens instead of polling: Webhooks.
• Generate a client from /api/v1/openapi.json.