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This project gathers and produces public domain data about legislation in Congress. See the README for how to set up this project to run locally. Also see congress-legislators for related data. This project is a part of theunitedstates.io/.

Download in bulk

Bulk downloads of the data is provided by some of the maintainers.

Data from the Sunlight Foundation

Current and archival bill data is available for public download hosted by the Sunlight Foundation. You can download ZIP files containing a JSON file for every bill in each Congress since 1973. Data for the current Congress is refreshed nightly. There is no need to download it more frequently than this; the official sources are not updated in real time.

113th Congress - updated nightly

112th Congress - 2011-2012	107th Congress - 2001-2002	102nd Congress - 1991-1992	97th Congress - 1981-1982
111th Congress - 2009-2010	106th Congress - 1999-2000	101st Congress - 1989-1990	96th Congress - 1979-1980
110th Congress - 2007-2008	105th Congress - 1997-1998	100th Congress - 1987-1988	95th Congress - 1977-1978
109th Congress - 2005-2006	104th Congress - 1995-1996	99th Congress - 1985-1986	94th Congress - 1975-1976
108th Congress - 2003-2004	103rd Congress - 1993-1994	98th Congress - 1983-1984	93rd Congress - 1973-1974

Data from GovTrack.us

Current and archival data is also available from GovTrack using the rsync protocol. See the instructions. The data available includes bill metadata (including historical bill data), bill text (MODS, plain text, XML, and historical bill text), votes, committee meetings, and amendments.

Documentation

Our scrapers output both JSON and XML. Currently only the JSON format is documented. See:

• Bills