Search state legislative bills across all covered US jurisdictions. Supports full-text search, jurisdiction/session filtering, subject tags, sponsor lookups, and sort order. Either jurisdiction or q (full-text) is required — combining both narrows results. include=sponsorships,actions returns sponsor and action history inline. sort=latest_action_desc surfaces bills currently moving. openstates_get_jurisdiction with include=legislative_sessions returns valid session identifiers for session filtering.
Fetch full detail for a specific state bill. Accepts either the three-part path (jurisdiction + session + bill_id) or a direct OCD bill ID (openstates_id from search results). Use include to request votes, actions, sponsorships, documents, and versions in one call rather than searching again. include=votes returns the full vote tally and per-legislator positions. include=actions returns the complete action history. Prefer openstates_id when available to avoid session identifier lookup.
Search state legislators and officials by name, jurisdiction, chamber, district, or party. Supports name substring matching (case-insensitive). org_classification targets a specific chamber: "upper" for Senate, "lower" for House/Assembly, "legislature" for all legislators, "executive" for governors and executive officials. include=offices adds phone, fax, and address. include=links adds website and social links. Omitting jurisdiction searches across all states and may return a large result set.
Find all state legislators representing a geographic coordinate. Pass latitude and longitude to get state senators and representatives (and potentially governor/executive officials) for that location. Useful for constituent-to-representative matching, address-based policy research, and electoral boundary analysis. This server does not geocode addresses — the caller must provide decimal-degree coordinates. Use include=offices to get contact information alongside the legislator list.
List committees for a jurisdiction. Experimental — Open States is actively working to restore committee support and not all states have data. Use chamber to scope to upper (senate) or lower (house) committees. Use classification=subcommittee to find subcommittees of a parent. Use include=memberships to get the full roster with member roles. The coverage_note field in the output will always note the experimental coverage limitations.
Fetch committee detail by OCD organization ID. Returns name, classification, and membership roster when include=memberships is requested. Experimental — not all states have committee data in Open States. Obtain the committee_id from openstates_search_committees.
Search hearings, floor sessions, and committee meetings. Experimental — most states do not publish event data to Open States. Use after and before to scope to a date range. Set require_bills=true to filter to events with bills on the agenda, which is the most useful filter for tracking legislation through committee. Use include=agenda,participants for full meeting context. Empty results often indicate the state lacks event data rather than no events occurring.
Fetch full event detail by OCD event ID. Returns agenda, participants, media links, and associated documents when requested via include. Experimental — event coverage is limited in Open States. Obtain the event_id from openstates_search_events.
List all jurisdictions covered by Open States — all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. Returns coverage metadata: latest bill update time, latest people update time, and optionally all legislative sessions with their identifiers. Use this when you need to discover valid session identifiers for a state before calling openstates_search_bills with a session filter. The legislative_sessions include option returns all historical and current sessions — always check valid session identifiers here before using them in bill searches, since formats vary widely by state (e.g., "2025", "2025-2026", "2025rs", "2025s1").
Fetch full metadata for a specific jurisdiction including all legislative sessions, their identifiers, and coverage dates. Use when you need to know the exact session identifier for a state before filtering bill searches — session formats vary widely (e.g., "2025", "2025rs", "2025s1"). Jurisdiction IDs follow OCD format: ocd-jurisdiction/country:us/state:{abbr}/government (e.g., ocd-jurisdiction/country:us/state:wa/government). State names (e.g., "Washington") and two-letter abbreviations (e.g., "wa") are also accepted.