API

Everything on this page answers today, without a key, from the same code that renders the pages, so a number you read here is the number the page shows. There is no version in these paths yet and nothing here calls a race. If you build on it, read the sections on caching, rate limits and data use; they are the whole of the contract.

What answers

All are GET, all return application/json, and all carry Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, so a page on any other site can fetch them directly. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD; timestamps are ISO 8601 with an offset. On-site links come back as a site-relative path; prefix https://openamerica.io.

A bill

The slug is <congress>-<TYPE>-<number>, the same one in the page URL: 119-HR-1, 119-S-2296, 119-HCONRES-89. Types are HR, S, HRES, SRES, HJRES, SJRES, HCONRES and SCONRES.

curl -s 'https://openamerica.io/bill/119-HR-1/?format=json'

Abbreviated response, as the site returned it on 2026-09-25:

{
  "type": "bill",
  "url": "https://openamerica.io/bill/119-HR-1/",
  "legislation_id": "119-HR-1",
  "congress": 119,
  "legislation_type": "HR",
  "legislation_number": 1,
  "title": "An act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14.",
  "origin_chamber": "House",
  "policy_area": "Economics and Public Finance",
  "subjects": ["Abortion", "Accounting and auditing", "Administrative law and regulatory procedures", "..."],
  "date_introduced": "2025-05-20",
  "latest_action": {"text": "Became Public Law No: 119-21.", "date": "2025-07-04"},
  "lifecycle": "enacted",
  "sponsor": {
    "bioguide_id": "A000375",
    "name": "Arrington, Jodey C.",
    "state": "Texas",
    "party": "Republican",
    "image_url": "https://www.congress.gov/img/member/115_rp_tx_19_arrington_jodey_200.jpg",
    "path": "/legislator/A000375/"
  },
  "cosponsor_count": 0,
  "actions_preview": [
    {"date": "2025-07-04", "text": "Became Public Law No: 119-21.", "type": "36000"},
    {"date": "2025-07-04", "text": "Signed by President.", "type": "36000"},
    "..."
  ],
  "congress_gov_source": "https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill/119/hr/1?format=json",
  "path": "/bill/119-HR-1/"
}

Not included: bill text, the CRS or AI summary, the cosponsor list, amendments, related bills, committee referrals and roll-call votes. They are on the page.

A member of Congress

Keyed by the bioguide ID that congress.gov uses; upper case, and the same one in the page URL.

curl -s 'https://openamerica.io/legislator/A000370/?format=json'

The full response on 2026-09-25:

{
  "type": "legislator",
  "url": "https://openamerica.io/legislator/A000370/",
  "bioguide_id": "A000370",
  "name": "Adams, Alma S.",
  "state": "North Carolina",
  "party": "Democratic",
  "image_url": "https://www.congress.gov/img/member/a000370_200.jpg",
  "path": "/legislator/A000370/",
  "first_name": "Alma",
  "last_name": "Adams",
  "current_member": true,
  "official_website": "https://adams.house.gov",
  "birth_year": 1946,
  "totals": {"bills_sponsored": 183, "bills_cosponsored": 2420}
}

Not included: the voting record, committee seats, party unity, missed votes, sponsored bills and contact details. They are on the page.

A roll-call vote

The id is Open America's own integer, the one in the page URL. Find them on the votes list, on a bill page, or in the senate_recent_votes of the floor feed below.

curl -s 'https://openamerica.io/vote/10782/?format=json'

The full response on 2026-09-25:

{
  "type": "vote",
  "url": "https://openamerica.io/vote/10782/",
  "vote_id": 10782,
  "congress": 119,
  "chamber": "S",
  "date": "2026-09-24T17:45:00+00:00",
  "question": "On the Concurrent Resolution H.Con.Res. 89",
  "result": "rejected",
  "bill": {
    "legislation_id": "119-HCONRES-89",
    "title": "Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran.",
    "path": "/bill/119-HCONRES-89/"
  },
  "breakdown": {"yea": 49, "not_voting": 1, "nay": 50}
}

Per-member positions are not in the vote JSON yet; the page lists every member's position, and a versioned endpoint that carries them is on the list below. Party splits, the roll-call number and the session are also page-only for now.

The floor, live

The payload the floor page polls: both chambers' status right now, the House floor narrative from the last 18 hours and the Senate roll calls from the last 18 hours.

curl -s 'https://openamerica.io/floor/live.json'

The full response on 2026-09-25, a day neither chamber sat, so both lists are empty:

{
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-25T14:44:12.533761+00:00",
  "house": {
    "ok": true,
    "in_session": false,
    "is_pro_forma": false,
    "subline": "Next Session: September 28th, 2026 at 12:00 PM",
    "live_stream": "https://live.house.gov/",
    "public_state": "not_in_session",
    "public_label": "Not in session",
    "state": "adjourned",
    "state_label": "Not in session",
    "confidence": "high",
    "last_activity_at": "2026-09-24T18:33:35+00:00"
  },
  "senate": {
    "ok": true,
    "in_session": false,
    "is_pro_forma": false,
    "subline": "Convenes at 3:00 p.m.",
    "live_stream": "https://www.senate.gov/isvp/stv.html?type=live&comm=stv&filename=stv092826",
    "public_state": "not_in_session",
    "public_label": "Not in session",
    "state": "stale_data",
    "state_label": "Data stale (18h)",
    "confidence": "low",
    "last_activity_at": "2026-09-24T17:45:00+00:00"
  },
  "recent_floor": [],
  "senate_recent_votes": []
}

The site's own page polls this once a minute and holds a push stream between polls. Poll no faster than every 30 seconds: the per-IP limit is 120 requests an hour, which is exactly one every 30 seconds. The Senate has no minute-by-minute narrative feed; its side of this payload is roll calls and status.

Find your representatives by ZIP

The House members whose districts touch the ZIP, resolved through the House's own ziplook service and cached on our side for 30 days, plus the state's two senators.

curl -s 'https://openamerica.io/api/zip-lookup/78201/'

The full response on 2026-09-25:

{
  "ok": true,
  "zip": "78201",
  "state": "TX",
  "representatives": [
    {"bioguide_id": "C001091", "name": "Castro, Joaquin", "party": "Democratic", "state": "Texas",
     "image_url": "https://www.congress.gov/img/member/69d7f5b07304cef7a0c977b1_200.jpg", "detail_url": "/legislator/C001091/"},
    {"bioguide_id": "C001131", "name": "Casar, Greg", "party": "Democratic", "state": "Texas",
     "image_url": "https://www.congress.gov/img/member/c001131_200.jpg", "detail_url": "/legislator/C001131/"}
  ],
  "senators": [
    {"bioguide_id": "C001056", "name": "Cornyn, John", "party": "Republican", "state": "Texas",
     "image_url": "https://www.congress.gov/img/member/c001056_200.jpg", "detail_url": "/legislator/C001056/"},
    {"bioguide_id": "C001098", "name": "Cruz, Ted", "party": "Republican", "state": "Texas",
     "image_url": "https://www.congress.gov/img/member/c001098_200.jpg", "detail_url": "/legislator/C001098/"}
  ]
}

Election results

/elections/results.json (with ?year= and ?office=) and /elections/seat/<key>.json carry the 2026 results the district map draws, as the official state feeds report them, from November 3. They are keyless, they carry an ETag, and they call no race: any leader or call in them is the state feed's own. Their fields are documented at /elections/api/.

Caching and polling

The bill, member and vote JSON answer with Cache-Control: public, max-age=300, s-maxage=3600 and an ETag. The edge may hold a copy for up to an hour, so a change on the page can take that long to reach the JSON. Send If-None-Match with the ETag you last saw and you get a 304 with no body when nothing changed. A bill or a member changes a few times a day at most, and a vote never changes once it is recorded, so once an hour is plenty.

curl -s -D - 'https://openamerica.io/vote/10782/?format=json' -H 'If-None-Match: W/"14c8d570e3a6616b0f6943aec9af9ceb"'
HTTP/2 304

The floor feed answers with public, max-age=30, stale-while-revalidate=10 and no ETag; poll it on a timer, 30 seconds at the fastest. The ZIP lookup answers with public, max-age=900. The election JSON has its own, shorter times, on its own page.

Rate limits

Past a per-IP limit you get HTTP 403 with an HTML body until the hour rolls over; it is not a 429 today, and turning it into one is on the list below. The slow list is the set of crawlers that ignore the crawl delay in robots.txt. Ordinary scripts are not on it and need no special User-Agent.

Cross-origin requests

Every JSON response above carries Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, on the 200 and on the 304, so a browser page on another domain can fetch() it with no proxy. The header is only ever added to a response produced for a request that carried no cookie, so send the request without credentials, which is the default. An HTML page never carries it.

Errors

A bill, member or vote that does not exist is a 404 with an HTML body, not JSON; check the status before parsing. The ZIP lookup's 404 is JSON, shown above. A request past a rate limit is a 403.

What this is not

• No race calls. Nothing on this site names a winner; the election JSON repeats what the state feed says and says which state said it.
• No keys, no per-key quotas, no bulk export, no CSV, no list endpoints in JSON. The lists (bills, members, votes, lobbying filings, trades, discharge petitions) are pages.
• No version. These paths are unversioned and will keep answering as they do today. A versioned /api/v1/ is planned, and the policy we intend to publish with it is that within a version fields are only added, a field or endpoint is removed only in a new version with the old one kept running for twelve months after, and a change is noted on this page the day it is decided.
• No per-member vote positions in JSON yet, and no lobbying, disclosure or trades JSON yet; those are pages for now.
• No AI summaries in JSON. Where a summary written by a model appears on a page it is labelled AI-generated, and if one is ever added to a JSON response it will carry the same label.

Freshness

While a chamber is in session, floor activity, roll-call votes and White House bill statements are re-checked every minute and new bills, committee meetings and hearings every five minutes; lobbying filings, House financial disclosures and committee rosters refresh once a day, the Senate's daily floor record hourly through the evening, discharge petitions every six hours, and election results every five minutes from the state feeds once counting begins on November 3, and every minute through election night.

How current each source is right now is on the status page, which is itself refreshed every two minutes. The methodology page says where every field comes from and how every statistic is computed.

Data use

The same statement appears on the methodology page, in the Terms of Service and in llms.txt.

Changes

This page carries its date at the top. When a field is added, it is added here the same day; a test fails the build when a field the code returns is missing from this page. Questions, or something you need that is not here: [email protected] or report a problem.