OPRA disseminates top-of-book, last sale, and daily statistics data for all US equity options exchanges through their Binary Output feed, which Databento receives over UDP multicast in our NY4 data center.

The OPRA Pillar Output Specification is available as a PDF from the OPRA website.

Timestamps

OPRA messages received by Databento include at most one timestamp, which has nanosecond precision. As with all of our datasets, we also collect a ts_recv timestamp when the packet was received by our capture server. The unused ts_in_delta field is set to 0 for all messages.

Databento Field	OPRA Field	Description
`ts_recv`	N/A	The capture-server-received timestamp.
`ts_event`	Block Timestamp	The consolidator-processed timestamp.

More details about our timestamps are available in our timestamping guide.

Venues

OPRA includes consolidated data for 18 options venues (as of March 2025). The publisher_id field on every record from Databento can be used to identify the venue associated with a trade event.

Value	MIC	Venue
20	AMXO	NYSE American
21	XBOX	BOX Options
22	XCBO	Cboe Options
23	EMLD	MIAX Emerald
24	EDGO	Cboe EDGX Options
25	GMNI	Nasdaq GEMX
26	XISX	Nasdaq ISE
27	MCRY	Nasdaq MRX
28	XMIO	MIAX Options
29	ARCO	NYSE Arca Options
30	OPRA	Options Price Reporting Authority
31	MPRL	MIAX Pearl
32	XNDQ	Nasdaq Options
33	XBXO	Nasdaq BX Options
34	C20X	Cboe C2 Options
35	XPHL	Nasdaq PHLX
36	BATO	Cboe BZX Options
37	MXOP	MEMX Options
61	SPHR	MIAX Sapphire

Info
These mappings are also available programmatically through the metadata.list_publishers endpoint.

CMBP-1

Along with the 18 options venues, OPRA also publishes the OPRA consolidated BBO. This consolidated BBO is available through Databento as the CMBP-1 schema. OPRA generates this consolidated BBO based on the following criteria in this order:

Price: Venues with the highest bid and lowest offer have overall priority. Minimum price increments must be at least 1 cent higher or lower than the previous price.
Size: Largest size takes precedence when multiple venues submit the same bid and/or offer price. There are no initial minimum size requirements. Size increments must be 10 contracts or better than the previous size.
Time: Earliest time takes precedence when multiple venues submit the same bid and/or offer price with the same size.

See also
More information on the OPRA consolidated BBO can be found in the OPRA BBO Guidelines FAQ

OPRA consolidated BBO records are published with a publisher_id value of 30 (OPRA_PILLAR_OPRA). These records indicate the venues containing the best bid and best offer by including their respective publisher_id in the bid_pb_00 and ask_pb_00 fields.

Trade records are published with the publisher_id corresponding to the venue where the trade happened.

Databento does not publish BBO records for regional quotes.

See also
Examples - US equity options volume by venue

Historical CMBP-1 requests

Due to the large quantity of data for the CMBP-1 schema, we recommend users request a batch download via batch.submit_job or the User portal.

Symbology

OPRA Pillar raw symbols are based on OCC symbology, also known as Options Symbology Initiative (OSI) symbology. These two terms are interchangeable.

In OCC symbology, every raw symbol has exactly 21 characters and is composed of four parts. Using the SPY November 17, 2023 $486.00 put option (SPY 231117P00486000) as an example, these are:

Component	Name	Description
`SPY`	Parent symbol	The right space-padded parent symbol. Often the symbol of the underlying, but not always such as with `SPXW` (SPX weekly options).
`211117`	Expiration date	The YYMMDD expiration date of the option.
`P`	Put or call	Whether the option is a `C`all or `P`ut.
`00486000`	Strike	The zero-padded eight-digit strike price with three decimal places.

Expirations

OPRA only provides date-granularity expiration data so the expiration field in the definition schema will always be at UTC midnight even when the option expires during or after the trading day.

Data prior to 2023-02-28

Data prior to 2023-02-28 was not generated from OPRA packet captures, but from subsampled data. This leads to the following differences on the data for those dates:

The cmbp-1, cbbo-1s and tcbbo schemas are not available. The highest granularity available for BBO data is the cbbo-1m schema.
Due to not being generated from packet captures, the ts_recv field has the event timestamp, and F_BAD_TS_RECV is always set.
The bid_pb_00 and ask_pb_00 fields do not contain the venue which is showing the NBBO.
The statistics schema only has information for Open Interest, which is published on an aggregated basis.