Do NYSE and Nasdaq Have Public APIs?

Do NYSE and Nasdaq have public APIs? Not in the sense most people mean when they type the question. Both companies publish their market data commercially, as licensed feeds delivered over exchange connectivity and through authorized vendors, alongside free delayed quote pages on their own consumer websites. Nasdaq also runs a paid HTTP data platform that issues API keys. Neither operates a free, open endpoint that streams live quotes to anybody who signs up, and the distance between those two facts is where most projects stall.

Do NYSE and Nasdaq have public APIs for live quotes?

Start with what the question hides. Neither "NYSE" nor "Nasdaq" is a single venue. Each is a holding company that operates several separately registered national securities exchanges, every one of them carrying its own market identifier code and its own data products.

SELECT
    operating_mic                                                         AS exchange_group,
    count()                                                               AS venues,
    arrayStringConcat(arraySort(groupArray(if(acronym = '', mic, acronym))), ', ') AS venue_acronyms
FROM global_markets.stocks_exchanges
WHERE asset_class = 'stocks'
  AND type = 'exchange'
  AND operating_mic != ''
GROUP BY operating_mic
ORDER BY venues DESC, exchange_group ASC

The exchange registry carries 9 US equity exchange operators. The largest of them, group code XNYS, runs 5 registered exchanges on its own: AMEX, ARCX, NSX, XCHI, XNYS. Ask for "the NYSE API" and the first question back will be which of those venues you mean, at which level of detail, and for display or for automated use.

What each exchange actually sells

NYSE sells proprietary feeds out of its Mahwah, New Jersey data center, from a full order book product down to lighter top of book trade and quote products. Nasdaq sells TotalView-ITCH, its depth of book feed, and the thinner Nasdaq Basic, out of Carteret. Delivery is a binary stream over a cross connect or an extranet circuit, with a vendor agreement and monthly access fees attached. It is not an HTTPS call with a key in the header.

Both exchanges also administer the consolidated tapes that most retail-facing data rests on. The CTA plan covers NYSE listed and other listed securities (Tape A and Tape B) and is administered by NYSE. The UTP plan covers Nasdaq listed securities (Tape C) and is administered by Nasdaq. The securities information processor behind each plan collapses every venue's quotes and trades into one stream. That stream, not an exchange's own feed, is what nearly every broker app and data API resells. Nasdaq's data arm separately publishes a REST platform with API keys, which is a commercial subscription catalog rather than an open live feed.

Feed, vendor API, and license: three different things

Most confusion here comes from collapsing three layers into one word.

1. The feed. Raw exchange output, binary, sequenced, delivered over connectivity you arrange yourself. You handle gap fills, order book building, and capacity. Our write-up on direct exchange feeds versus the SIP covers how the two feed layers differ in content and latency.
2. The vendor API. An HTTP or WebSocket interface a redistributor builds on top of a feed, with JSON, authentication, symbol normalization, and history. This is what you are shopping for when you say "API".
3. The license. The contract governing either one. It sets who may see the data, on what screens, inside which legal entity, and whether machines may consume it without a human looking. The license sits on top of both other layers and travels with the data wherever it goes.

A vendor API without the right license is not a shortcut. The vendor is contractually bound to entitle you, report you, and cut you off if the paperwork does not match the use.

One ticker prints across a dozen venues

There is a practical reason a single exchange's own feed is rarely the right purchase. A liquid stock trades everywhere at once, and any one exchange sees only its own slice of the day.

WITH venue_shares AS
(
    SELECT
        exchange    AS exchange_code,
        count()     AS trade_count,
        sum(size)   AS shares
    FROM global_markets.stocks_trades
    WHERE ticker = 'AAPL'
      AND sip_timestamp >= toDateTime('2026-09-15 00:00:00', 'UTC')
      AND sip_timestamp <  toDateTime('2026-09-16 00:00:00', 'UTC')
    GROUP BY exchange_code
)
SELECT
    if(x.name = '', concat('Exchange code ', toString(v.exchange_code)), x.name) AS venue,
    round(100 * v.shares / (SELECT sum(shares) FROM venue_shares), 2)            AS pct_of_shares,
    v.trade_count                                                                AS trade_count
FROM venue_shares AS v
LEFT JOIN
(
    SELECT
        toString(id) AS ex_id,
        any(name)    AS name
    FROM global_markets.stocks_exchanges
    WHERE asset_class = 'stocks'
    GROUP BY ex_id
) AS x ON x.ex_id = toString(v.exchange_code)
ORDER BY pct_of_shares DESC
LIMIT 12

The twelve busiest lines on that session are shown. The leading one, Nasdaq, carried 48.52 percent of the shares in view, and the twelfth carried 0.18 percent. Several of the lines are trade reporting facilities rather than exchanges, which is where prints arranged away from an exchange book are published. A chart of one exchange's own feed would show a single bar from this picture and call it the market.

Is NYSE or Nasdaq market data free?

Honestly: partly. Delayed quotes, typically fifteen minutes behind, and end of day summary prices are widely available at no cost, including on the exchanges' own sites and from several API providers. Consolidated real time data is inexpensive for a non-professional subscriber, often a few dollars a month per user across the tapes, and materially more expensive for a professional, where per-user fees stack with access, redistribution, and non-display fees. The detailed ladder lives in what real time market data costs.

The part worth internalizing: your status is set by the license definitions you attest to, and intent has nothing to do with it. Employment at a financial firm, registration with a regulator, or using the data in a business can place you on the professional side even when the project is a weekend experiment. Professional and non professional market data status walks through the tests. Free tiers also differ in substance, not only in freshness.

SELECT
    ticker                      AS symbol,
    round(count() / 3600.0, 1)  AS quotes_per_sec
FROM global_markets.cache_stocks_quotes
WHERE ticker IN ('AAPL', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'SPY', 'KO')
  AND sip_timestamp >= toDateTime('2026-09-15 14:00:00', 'UTC')
  AND sip_timestamp <  toDateTime('2026-09-15 15:00:00', 'UTC')
  AND bid_price > 0
  AND ask_price > bid_price
GROUP BY ticker
ORDER BY quotes_per_sec DESC

Over that one hour, SPY averaged 128.1 two sided quote updates a second, while MSFT averaged 9.8. Those rates are what a real time entitlement pays for. A free delayed endpoint hands you one price per symbol per request, which answers a different class of question entirely.

What a real time quote feed carries

The quote is a two sided price with sizes, and its width changes across the day. A snapshot cannot show that; a stream can.

SELECT
    formatDateTime(bucket, '%H:%i') AS et_time,
    round(median_cents, 2)          AS median_spread_cents,
    quote_count
FROM
(
    SELECT
        toStartOfFifteenMinutes(toTimeZone(sip_timestamp, 'America/New_York')) AS bucket,
        quantileExact(0.5)(toFloat64(ask_price - bid_price) * 100) AS median_cents,
        count() AS quote_count
    FROM global_markets.cache_stocks_quotes
    WHERE ticker = 'AAPL'
      AND sip_timestamp >= toDateTime('2026-09-15 04:00:00', 'UTC')
      AND sip_timestamp <  toDateTime('2026-09-16 04:00:00', 'UTC')
      AND bid_price > 0
      AND ask_price > bid_price
    GROUP BY bucket
    HAVING count() >= 50
    ORDER BY bucket
)
ORDER BY et_time

Each row is a fifteen minute block of New York clock time, and 61 blocks had enough quoting activity to measure. The first block in view, 04:00, shows a median quoted spread of 24 cents. The last, 19:45, shows 11 cents. The curve between them is the content a licensed real time feed delivers and a delayed snapshot flattens into one number.

Can I use NYSE or Nasdaq data in a commercial product?

This is the paragraph that catches hobby projects. Looking at data yourself is internal use. Putting it on a screen another person sees makes you a redistributor, and redistribution is a separate, negotiated permission with its own fees, attribution requirements, and reporting obligations. Showing live prices to signed up users typically requires exchange approval of your display, per user entitlement tracking, monthly usage reports, and acceptance of an audit right. Feeding prices into automated logic with no human watching is non-display use, which the exchanges price separately again and often higher. Derived values can inherit the same terms: a volatility figure computed from licensed quotes may still count as the licensed data under the agreement. The vendor display rule sets out what counts as a display and what obligations attach once you have one.

Where to go from here

For a side project, start with delayed or end of day data under a permissive provider license and move to real time only when the use case genuinely needs it. The practical catalog of entry points is in free stock market data API options, and the cost ladder for stepping up is in what real time market data costs. When you reach the point of choosing between a consolidated stream and an exchange's own feed, direct exchange feeds versus the SIP is the comparison to read first.

FAQ

Does NYSE have a public API?

NYSE has no free open API for live quotes. It publishes market data as licensed feed products delivered over exchange connectivity and through authorized vendors, with a signed agreement and monthly fees. Free delayed quotes appear on its website for individual lookups.

Is Nasdaq market data free?

Delayed Nasdaq quotes and end of day prices are free in many places, including Nasdaq's own site. Real time Nasdaq feeds and the depth of book products are paid, and Nasdaq's HTTP data platform is a commercial subscription service with API keys.

Can I get real time stock prices for free?

For personal, non-professional use, several brokers and vendors include real time consolidated quotes at no extra charge once you accept the exchange subscriber terms. Free real time data for a business, an app with users, or automated trading logic is very rare, since those uses carry redistribution and non-display fees.

Do I need a license to display stock prices in my app?

Yes, once other people can see the prices. Showing exchange sourced quotes to users makes you a redistributor under the data agreements, which brings display approval, per user entitlement tracking, and reporting duties. Delayed data lowers the cost and the paperwork but does not remove the license.

What is the difference between an exchange feed and a data API?

An exchange feed is the raw binary output of one venue, delivered over connectivity you arrange. A data API is a vendor's HTTP or WebSocket layer built on top of one or more feeds. The license governing the underlying data applies to both.

Every panel on this page ships with the SQL that produced it, so you can see exactly how each number was counted. To ask the same questions of a different symbol or a different session, put them in plain English on the Strasmore terminal.