Documents

Retrieve notices, agendas, minutes, and staff reports, with their text, publishers, and events.

Documents are everything a government source publishes outside of a bill’s own record: rulemaking notices, agendas, minutes, staff reports, and press releases. Each document is issued by a publisher, such as an agency, a board, or a council.

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Retrieving Documents

To retrieve a list of documents, send a GET request to the /documents endpoint. For example, the following request retrieves Maryland documents published since October that mention data centers:

GET /api/v0/documents?jurisdiction=US-MD&q=%22data%20center%22&published_after=2026-10-01

The /documents endpoint accepts the jurisdiction, publisher, category, q, published_after, published_before, topic, and updated_since query parameters. They behave just like their bill counterparts.

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The Document Object

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

{
  "id": "c27a9e04-1b6d-4f3a-9e8c-2a5b7d1f0e63",
  "type": "document",
  "title": "Notice of Public Hearing: Zoning Text Amendment for Data Center Uses",
  "description": "The Planning Board will hear a proposed amendment setting setbacks, noise limits and power-supply rules for data centers in industrial zones.",
  "published_date": "2026-10-28",
  "publisher": {
    "id": "0f8e...",
    "name": "Fairview County Planning Board",
    "category": "government",
    "jurisdiction": { "id": "US-MD", "name": "Maryland" }
  },
  "url": "https://planning.fairviewcounty.example/...",
  "categories": [ { "id": "5d21...", "label": "Land use and planning" } ],
  "files": [
    { "name": "ZTA-26-05 staff report.pdf", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "https://..." }
  ],
  "text_url": "https://app.policymate.io/api/v0/documents/c27a9e04-.../text",
  "text_method": "ocr",
  "mentions": [ { "type": "bill", "id": "4d1c...", "name": "ZTA 26-05" } ],
  "events": [
    {
      "id": "71b0...",
      "type": "meeting",
      "name": "Planning Board public hearing on ZTA 26-05",
      "starts_at": "2026-11-20T18:30:00-05:00",
      "location": "County Office Building, Hearing Room 1"
    }
  ],
  "updated_at": "2026-10-29T04:02:11Z"
}

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Document Text

The GET /documents/{id}/text endpoint returns a document’s plain text. Depending on the source, this is either the text the publisher released or the text we extracted from its files, using OCR for scans. As with bill texts, the text_method attribute tells you which.

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Publishers

The GET /publishers endpoint returns the sources your account may access, along with the jurisdiction each one belongs to. You may pass a publisher’s id to the publisher parameter of the /documents endpoint.

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Events

When a document announces a meeting, a hearing, or a comment deadline, PolicyMate records it as an event linked to that document. The GET /events endpoint accepts the jurisdiction, type, starts_after, and starts_before query parameters. An event’s type is one of meeting, vote, deadline, consultation, or other.