Congress.gov Bill, Amendment & Vote Tracker – Legislative Data API

A Congress.gov API wrapper and legislative-data feed that pulls federal bills and normalizes each into a clean record: bill id, congress, type/number, title, origin chamber, latest action and update date, with a direct public URL. Use it to build a bill-tracking tool, a legislative-intelligence feed, or a policy monitor by congress or bill type.

Who uses it

Lobbyists and government-affairs teams, policy-intelligence firms, trade associations, newsrooms, and GovTech/civic-tech products.

Why this is worth charging for

Congress.gov offers an official API but it requires a key, paginates by offset, and returns nested action objects. This actor normalizes bills into a deduplicated, schedule-ready feed sorted by latest update, so you catch status changes on the bills you care about without polling by hand.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "billId": "118-HR-815",
  "congress": 118,
  "type": "HR",
  "number": "815",
  "title": "Making emergency supplemental appropriations",
  "originChamber": "House",
  "latestActionDate": "2024-04-24",
  "latestActionText": "Became Public Law No: 118-50.",
  "updateDate": "2024-04-25",
  "url": "https://www.congress.gov/bill/118/hr/815",
  "source": "Congress.gov"
}

Input

Field	Description
apiKey	Free key from https://api.congress.gov/sign-up/. Required.
congress	Restrict to a congress, e.g. 118. Leave blank for the most recently updated across all.
billType	Bill type (only applied when a congress is set).
pageSize	Results per page (max 250).
maxPagesToScan	Pages per run.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.01, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• bill-record — $0.01 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

A daily monitor of recently-updated bills returns tens of records for pennies. Enumerating a full congress is a larger one-time pull controlled by pages scanned.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official api.congress.gov/v3 service; a free API key is required. No proxies needed. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Do I need an API key?

Yes — a free Congress.gov key. Sign up takes a minute and the key goes straight into the input.

Can I track a specific congress and bill type?

Yes. Set congress and billType to enumerate, e.g. all House bills in the 118th, sorted by latest action.

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Need the rest of the record on these companies?

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Every enriched field carries its source and its match confidence. Only matches above the accept threshold are merged — anything weaker is surfaced as a suggestion and never folded into the record, because a false join is worse than returning nothing.

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