Bills

Retrieving Bills

To retrieve a list of bills, send a GET request to the /bills endpoint. For example, the following request retrieves Texas bills that mention data centers, latest milestone first:

GET /api/v0/bills?jurisdiction=US-TX&q=%22data%20center%22&sort=-last_milestone_date

To retrieve a single bill, send a GET request to /bills/{id}. The response contains the bill along with its sponsors and latest milestone.

Filtering Bills

The /bills endpoint accepts the following query parameters. Any of them may be combined:

Parameter	Example	Description
`jurisdiction`	`US-TX`	Only bills from this jurisdiction. May be repeated.
`q`	`data center`	Full-text search over the number, title, description, and text
`status`	`in_procedure`	Only bills with this status
`category`	a category `id`	Only bills in this category or its children
`chamber`	`tx-house`	Only bills from this chamber
`sponsor`	a person `id`	Only bills this person sponsored
`introduced_after`, `introduced_before`	`2026-01-01`	Only bills introduced within this range
`updated_since`	`2026-11-04T00:00:00Z`	Only bills that changed since this time
`topic`	a topic `id`	Only bills recommended for this topic
`sort`	`-last_milestone_date`	Also `introduced_date`, or `relevance` when searching with `q`. Prefix with `-` for descending order.

The Bill Object

A bill looks like the following. The values below are illustrative:

{
  "id": "9b3e2c1a-4f5d-4b8e-a1c2-7d6e5f4a3b21",
  "type": "bill",
  "jurisdiction": { "id": "US-TX", "name": "Texas" },
  "number": "HB 1234",
  "title": "Relating to the water and energy use of large data centers.",
  "description": "Requires data centers above 75 MW to report annual water and electricity consumption to the Public Utility Commission.",
  "chamber": { "id": "tx-house", "name": "Texas House of Representatives" },
  "procedure_type": "bill",
  "status": "in_procedure",
  "introduced_date": "2027-01-14",
  "last_milestone": {
    "date": "2027-02-03",
    "type": "committee_action",
    "title": "Referred to State Affairs"
  },
  "sponsors": [
    { "person_id": "5c1d...", "name": "Jane Doe", "party": "Democratic Party" },
    { "person_id": "a7e2...", "name": "John Roe", "party": "Republican Party" }
  ],
  "categories": [ { "id": "0b6f2d4e-...", "label": "Energy policy" } ],
  "summary": { "text": "The bill would require ...", "source": "ai" },
  "links": {
    "official": "https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=90R&Bill=HB1234",
    "app": "https://app.policymate.io/entity/9b3e2c1a-..."
  },
  "mentions_count": 3,
  "created_at": "2027-01-15T06:12:40Z",
  "updated_at": "2027-02-04T06:10:02Z"
}

The status attribute describes the bill’s legal state. It is deliberately coarse, so that it means the same thing in every legislature, and contains one of the following values: draft, in_procedure, adopted, in_force, withdrawn, rejected, repealed, or expired. The summary.source attribute tells you who wrote the summary: official when the legislature publishes one, editor when our team wrote it, and ai when PolicyMate generated it from the bill’s text.

Milestones

A bill’s history is made of milestones: its introduction, committee actions, readings, votes, and final outcome. You may retrieve a bill’s milestones, oldest first, using the GET /bills/{id}/milestones endpoint:

{
  "date": "2027-04-22",
  "type": "chamber_vote",
  "title": "Passed the House on third reading",
  "source_url": "https://capitol.texas.gov/...",
  "document_url": "https://capitol.texas.gov/.../HB01234H.pdf",
  "vote": { "for": 98, "against": 47, "abstained": 0, "absent": 2, "not_voting": 3 }
}

A milestone’s type is one of proposed, committee_action, reading, chamber_vote, adopted, signed_into_law, entered_into_force, rejected, withdrawn, expired, repealed, document_published, or other. When the source publishes vote counts, the milestone also includes a vote object.

Bill Texts

The GET /bills/{id}/texts endpoint returns each version of a bill’s text. Every version includes a link to the original file and, when available, a link to its plain text:

{
  "id": "71a2...",
  "name": "Introduced version",
  "mime_type": "application/pdf",
  "url": "https://capitol.texas.gov/.../HB01234I.pdf",
  "text_url": "https://app.policymate.io/api/v0/bills/9b3e2c1a-.../texts/71a2.../text",
  "text_method": "ocr"
}

The text_method attribute describes how the plain text was obtained: source when the legislature publishes the text itself, extracted when we read it from the file, or ocr when the file is a scan.

Plain text extracted from files, and especially text produced by OCR, may differ from the published wording. You should always treat the original file as the authoritative text.

Getting Started

Using the API

Reference

Retrieving Bills

Filtering Bills

The Bill Object

Milestones

Bill Texts

​Retrieving Bills

​Filtering Bills

​The Bill Object

​Milestones

​Bill Texts

Retrieving Bills

Filtering Bills

The Bill Object

Milestones

Bill Texts