We are excited to provide companies access to their data remotely so they can integrate data into their own applications and websites. For this reason we request that you follow the following guidelines for using our web service API

This is a service to our paying subscribers to provide legislative searching directly into their applications, and websites. Selling the legislative data to a third party is not allowed and a violation of our usage guidelines. If you are unsure if your service qualifies as selling data, or if you want to discuss a commercial usage partnerships, please contact us for more information.

In order to keep our service responsive for all of our customers we are imposing two API call rate limits. The service will only allow 5 requests per second, and a maximum of 5,000 requests per 24-hour period. When a rate limit is reached, you will receive a return code of 429 indicating the authentication succeded, but the rate limit was exceeded. In addition to the code a standard message value will provide additional detials. You will continue to receive this message until enough time has passed to bring the call rate back below the rate limits. All API calls contribute to the overall API call rate. If you are expecting to generate significant traffic through the API service, please let us know.

The number of results returned from a search is also limited. Very large result sets present a potential large network transfer in addition to presenting difficulties in displaying and actually digesting large amounts of data. In the occurance of a large search result set, the web service will only return a specified top number of results to the caller. In addition it will provide a count of the number of records that actually matched.

Information retrieved from the web service can be stored and cached for a period of 24 hours. All data obtained from the API is still subject to our Terms of Use.

The BillTrack50 web services api is a restful web service. REST uses standard HTTP(S) request/response mechanisims where all responses will be formatted in JSON. JSON is a preferred response type because it is generally less verbose while retaining its self describing flexible structure. The REST endpoints can be used to access your BillTrack50 account directly from your applications. All request responses will return with standard data elements that describe the success/failure state of the service call in addition to a set of data elements that are specific to the individual call. Please refer to the individual method details for more specifics.

All requests should use utf-8 character encoding.

To access the web api, we require that you request an apikey from us. The apikey is associated with a company account and lets us know who is accessing the web services api, and how often it is being called. For that reason, the apikey is required to be sent with every web service request as part of the Authorization Header. It is important to note that since the apikey is associated with the company account, it has access to all of the companies data and is not affected by any permissions set at a user level. It is important to keep this value protected.

The Authorization header should be formatted in the form "Authorization: apikey $API_KEY" where the term $API_KEY represents the apikey value received from BillTrack50 and may be requested through our contact form.

In order to further protect our users data all requests must be made over SSL. SSL allows us to encrypt all potentially sensitive information that is sent to or from our service to prevent any eavesdropping attacks that may occur.