Congress.gov Bills Tracker API: Sponsors, Actions & CBO

Track US federal legislation through the official Congress.gov API with your own free key, for government-affairs teams, newsrooms, compliance staff and AI agents. It costs $0.003 per bill and $0.002 per CRS summary, so 100 bills with summaries cost $0.50.

Follow US federal legislation through the Library of Congress's official Congress.gov API with your own free key. List the newest bills and resolutions of any Congress by chamber, type and update date, filter them by words in the title, and get each bill with sponsors, policy area, latest action, cosponsor, action, amendment and committee counts, enacted law numbers, CBO cost estimates and (optionally) the latest CRS summary. Look up specific bills by number. Built for policy monitoring, government-affairs agents, newsrooms and compliance teams.

Built and maintained by Lathewright. Lathewright is operated by AI systems under human ownership. A person reviews and approves everything we publish, send and sell. Pay only for what you get: $0.003 per bill, $0.002 per summary.

What you can do with it

• Daily legislative feed: run with updatedSince = yesterday and titleKeywords such as privacy, crypto, tariff and push new or changed bills to Slack, email or a tracker.
• Portfolio of bills: billLookup for the ten bills you follow, scheduled hourly, to catch committee actions, floor votes and enactment.
• Research: who sponsors what, by state and party; which bills became law; what the CBO estimated.
• Agent tool: "what is the latest action on H.R. 1 in the 119th Congress?" is one call.

Example tasks

Paste any of these into the Input tab, or send the same JSON through the API. Prices are the per-result prices listed under Pricing.

1. House bills with 'privacy' in the title, updated this month

{
  "congressApiKey": "YOUR_CONGRESS_API_KEY",
  "mode": "recentBills",
  "congress": 119,
  "billType": "hr",
  "titleKeywords": ["privacy"],
  "updatedSince": "2026-10-01",
  "maxBills": 20
}

What comes back: One row per bill with billId, title, policyArea, sponsors, introducedDate, latestAction, becameLaw and url. Up to 20 rows, at most $0.06.

2. Look up two bills by number, with summaries

{
  "congressApiKey": "YOUR_CONGRESS_API_KEY",
  "mode": "billLookup",
  "bills": ["119/hr/1", "118/s/4361"],
  "includeSummary": true
}

What comes back: The two bills with sponsors, counts and the latest CRS summary when one exists. $0.003 per bill plus $0.002 per summary.

3. Latest Senate bills, list view only

{
  "congressApiKey": "YOUR_CONGRESS_API_KEY",
  "mode": "recentBills",
  "billType": "s",
  "includeDetails": false,
  "maxBills": 10
}

What comes back: A lighter row per bill without the detail lookups.

Input

Field	Type	Notes
congressApiKey	secret	Free key from api.congress.gov/sign-up (5,000 requests per hour); DEMO_KEY for up to 10 test calls a day
mode	select	recentBills or billLookup
congress	integer	119 = 2025-2026; empty = all
billType	select	hr, s, hjres, sjres, hconres, sconres, hres, sres, all
updatedSince, updatedUntil	YYYY-MM-DD	Update-date window (UTC)
titleKeywords	array	Any-match in the title, applied to up to 5,000 scanned bills
bills	array	congress/type/number for billLookup
includeDetails	boolean	Sponsors, policy area, counts, laws, CBO estimates (one extra request per bill)
includeSummary	boolean	Latest CRS summary text (one more request per bill)
maxBills	integer	Cap per run

{ "congressApiKey": "<your key>", "mode": "recentBills", "congress": 119, "billType": "all", "updatedSince": "2026-10-18", "titleKeywords": ["privacy", "artificial intelligence"], "includeDetails": true, "maxBills": 100 }

{ "congressApiKey": "<your key>", "mode": "billLookup", "bills": ["119/hr/1", "118/s/4361"], "includeSummary": true }

Output

{
  "type": "bill",
  "billId": "119-hr-9716",
  "congress": 119,
  "billType": "hr",
  "number": "9716",
  "title": "PRIVACY Act",
  "originChamber": "House",
  "introducedDate": "2026-07-15",
  "updateDate": "2026-10-18",
  "latestAction": { "date": "2026-07-15", "text": "Referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce." },
  "policyArea": "Crime and Law Enforcement",
  "sponsors": [{ "name": "Rep. Self, Keith [R-TX-3]", "party": "R", "state": "TX", "district": 3, "bioguideId": "S001224" }],
  "cosponsorCount": 7,
  "actionCount": 4,
  "amendmentCount": 0,
  "committeeCount": 1,
  "textVersionCount": 1,
  "summaryCount": 1,
  "laws": [],
  "becameLaw": false,
  "cboCostEstimates": [],
  "summary": "This bill ... (when includeSummary is on)",
  "url": "https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9716",
  "apiUrl": "https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill/119/hr/9716",
  "source": "api.congress.gov v3"
}

Unparseable or unknown bill references become type: "error" rows at the reduced rate.

Pricing

Event	Price	Notes
Bill found (bill)	$0.003	Primary event, with details when requested. 100 bills = $0.30
Summary added (bill-summary)	$0.002	Per bill that has a CRS summary, when includeSummary is on
Failed lookup (lookup-error)	$0.0005	Bad reference or not found

Plus Apify's standard start fee ($0.00005 per run). No proxies, no browser. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at the limit.

How to use it

• Apify Console: paste your key, fill in the form, press Start, download JSON, CSV or Excel from the Output tab.
• API: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/lathewright~congress-bills-tracker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<token> with the input JSON as the body.
• n8n, Make, Zapier: use the Apify node/module, pick this Actor, paste the input JSON, schedule it daily with yesterday's date in updatedSince.

Use from an AI agent (MCP)

Add this Actor as a tool in Claude, Cursor, VS Code or any MCP client with https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=lathewright/congress-bills-tracker. The Actor description is the tool description, and the input fields above are the tool parameters. Example prompts: "Which House bills mentioning privacy were updated this week?", "Status and sponsors of S. 4361 in the 118th Congress".

Data source, robots.txt and fair use

• Congress.gov API v3 (api.congress.gov/v3/bill...), run by the Library of Congress. Checked 19 October 2026: the host serves no robots.txt (403 for the file); access is governed by the API's terms, which require a free api.data.gov key (sent as the X-Api-Key header, never logged) and allow 5,000 requests per hour per key. The Actor spaces requests 250 ms apart and uses at most one list request per 250 bills plus one request per bill for details and one for summaries.
• Data are public legislative records; sponsor and cosponsor names are those of Members of Congress acting in their public office.
• DEMO_KEY (api.data.gov's shared demo key) is limited to 10 requests per day on this API and is only meant for trying the Actor.

FAQ

Can I search bill text? The API has no full-text search; titleKeywords filters titles of recently updated bills. Pair with Congress.gov's text endpoints (counted in textVersionCount) for full text.

Which Congress is current? The 119th (2025-2026). Numbers increase every two years.

Are votes and members included? Not in this Actor; it focuses on bills. Actions counts and latest actions capture floor and committee activity.