Awesome Public Datasets: More Than 1,000 Free Data Sources, Sorted by Topic
A dataset is a ready-made table of facts, like nutrition values for foods or road maps for a county. Awesome Public Datasets is a free list on GitHub that points to more than 1,000 of them. As of October 2026 we counted 1,069 entries in 36 topics, including Government, Economics, Agriculture, Transportation and GIS (map data). The Government topic alone has 196 entries.
Ways to use it this week
- A bakery or café can open the Agriculture topic and find USDA FoodData Central, the US government's food composition data, to look up nutrition values for common ingredients.
- A contractor or delivery business can look under GIS for TIGER/Line, the Census Bureau's files of US boundaries and roads, to sketch out a service area.
- Anyone writing a blog post or a sales letter can browse Government and Economics for official numbers to cite, instead of repeating a statistic with no source.
Try it now (no key): go to https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/download-datasets/ (it is listed in the Agriculture topic). It offers free CSV and JSON downloads with no sign-up. We downloaded the April 2026 "Foundation Foods" CSV file (about 3.8 MB, zipped) without an account. CSV files open in Excel or Google Sheets.
Limits and rules
- The list itself says: "Most of the data sets listed below are free, however, some are not." Check each one before you plan around it.
- Every entry has a status icon. When we checked, 98 entries were marked "Please fix me," so expect some dead or moved links.
- Each dataset has its own license and terms. The list's license does not cover the data.
- Some entries are research archives made for scientists, not for spreadsheets. If a page is hard to follow, skip it and try another source.
License and credit: the list is under the MIT license, so keep its copyright notice if you copy the list itself. For the data, follow the license and credit rules on each dataset's own page.
Golden Rock can help pull a dataset like this into a client's website or app, for example a nutrition table or a service-area map.
Who should care: owners who want real numbers and real facts on their website, without paying for a data service first.