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

The table scrolls sideways to the cache and limit columns.

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",
  "date_precision": "minute",
  "source": "chamber_xml",
  "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, plus, while senate.gov's vote files are not available to us, the Senate roll calls from the Congressional Record since 00:00 Eastern yesterday (the Record arrives the morning after a vote).

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

The shape of a full response on a day neither chamber sat, so both lists are empty. The values are illustrative, not a captured response; the subline values are in the format described under Changes below.

{
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-25T14:44:12.533761+00:00",
  "house": {
    "ok": true,
    "in_session": false,
    "is_pro_forma": false,
    "subline": "Next session: Mon Sep 28, 12:00 PM ET",
    "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": "Next session: Mon Sep 28, 3:00 PM ET",
    "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 limit is 120 requests an hour per client, which is exactly one every 30 seconds, and over IPv6 a client is the whole /64 network (see rate limits). 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

A limit counts per client: an IPv4 address, or over IPv6 the /64 network the address is in, not the single address, because one home, office or server is handed a whole /64. Every machine behind one IPv6 connection therefore shares one allowance. A browser signed in to this site is counted by its account on the floor feed instead. Past a limit you get HTTP 429 with an HTML body and a Retry-After header giving the seconds until that limit's hour rolls over. 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 429 with Retry-After.

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 and Senate financial disclosures, committee rosters and FEC campaign totals refresh once a day, the Senate's daily floor record hourly through the evening, discharge petitions every six hours, and 2026 election results every five minutes from the state feeds.

How current the bill, vote, floor and Congressional Record feeds are right now is on the status page, which is itself refreshed every two minutes. The methodology page lists the sources behind the data and defines the main statistics.

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.

• 2026-11-07, vote JSON: two fields added, source and date_precision. While senate.gov's own vote files are not available to us, Senate roll calls come from the Congressional Record, which prints the day but not the time: such a vote has date_precision day, its date reads noon Eastern, it stays in the floor feed's senate_recent_votes from its day until the end of the next, with a time_label such as Sep 30, time not in the Record, and it is not counted in last_activity_at. No field was removed.
• 2026-11-07, ZIP lookup: each member gains natural_name (the name in reading order) and photo_url (the portrait from this site's own copy when there is one). name and image_url are unchanged.
• 2026-10-27, rate limits: a request past a limit is answered 429 with a Retry-After header, where it was a 403 with no hint of when to retry. An IPv6 client is counted per /64 network rather than per address, the ZIP lookup also caps an IPv6 /48 at 600 requests an hour, and the floor feed counts a signed-in browser by its account. No field changed.
• 2026-09-27, floor/live.json subline: the format changed. Both chambers now use one format, Convened at 10:02 AM ET or Next session: Mon Sep 28, 3:00 PM ET. Before, the House field carried the Clerk's line verbatim (Next Session: September 28th, 2026 at 12:00 PM) and the Senate's read Convenes at 3:00 p.m. with no day. No field was added or removed. Build on public_state, not on this text.