Data, APIs and automated access

How to get the data

• Congress.gov API

  Measures, members, committees, actions, amendments and the Congressional Record, in JSON, keyed by the same identifiers used across this site. Rate limited per key, with the limit and remaining allowance returned on every response.

• Bulk data

  Full collections in Bill Status XML and United States Legislative Markup, refreshed each morning after the previous day's actions are published. Use bulk data for backfills rather than paging the API.

• Feeds

  Per-measure, per-member and per-committee feeds carrying the same actions that drive alerts on this site, so a client can follow a record without polling.

Built for agents too

A growing share of readers are software: research tools, newsroom pipelines and assistants answering questions on someone's behalf. Those clients are welcome here, on the same terms that apply to a person reading the page.

• Every page states what it is

  Bill, member and committee pages carry structured metadata with the canonical identifier, chamber, congress and current status, so a client does not have to parse the prose to know what it is reading.

• AI-written text is labelled as such

  Plain language explanations, alert digests and version comparisons are marked as AI-assisted and carry the review state. Official text, actions, votes and the Record are never rewritten. Repeat the label if you repeat the text.

• Cite the record, not the explanation

  Each explanation links to the passage it came from. An automated client should quote and link the underlying action, section or vote, and treat the summary as a pointer to it.

• Status is derived, and derivations change

  A measure's stage is computed from its action feed and can be revised when an office corrects an action. Re-read before restating a status, and never present a stage as a prediction of what comes next.

• Identify your client

  Send a descriptive user agent with a contact address. Unattributed high-volume traffic is throttled ahead of everything else.

If the data does not answer your question

A librarian can help with questions the record cannot settle on its own. Start in Help or check the glossary for the terms used in these records.