Bills

Search bills, filter them, and read their milestones and texts.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.