Open Legislation API

Important

API changes starting December 1, 2026

  • Requests made with an API key are limited to 10 requests per second and 4 concurrent requests per key. See Rate limits.

  • The deprecated options that return full items from some listing, search and update endpoints, such as full on bill listing and search, are removed. Requests that set them to true are rejected with HTTP 400. See the API migration notes.

The /api/3 base URL and API keys stay the same, and requests for a single item still return the full item.

Open Legislation is a web service that delivers legislative information from the New York State Senate to the public in near-real time. It is used to serve legislative data for nysenate.gov and other various services.

Legislative data is sent via the Legislative Bill Drafting Commission (LBDC) in a raw file format. The data is ingested and cleaned up internally by Open Leg and made available for consumption through a REST API.

This documentation explains how to utilize the REST API to retrieve bills, resolutions, laws, committee agendas, and more. You will need to sign up for a free API key from the Open Legislation homepage in order to use this service. To get a key and make your first request, see Getting Started. The rules every endpoint shares are in API Conventions.

The code is open source and available on Github.