About the Data on GovTrack.us

GovTrack gets its information from a variety of sources, including official government data as well as community data repositories. We also do our own original research. Here is the data we have, the sources we use, and suggestions for how you can get it too.

In 2005, we were the first to make U.S. federal legislative information comprehensively available in an open, structured data format for researchers, journalists, other public interest projects, and anyone to freely reuse for any purpose. Our data was the basis for dozens of other open government projects, including major projects of the Sunlight Foundation and investigative stories at major news publications, and continued until 2017, when the U.S. Congress began publishing open, structured data itself. You can read about our 15-year campaign to open up Congress’s data.

Current Information (118^th Congress)
Members of Congress	Biographical information and committee assignments for current and former Members of Congress are from the congress-legislators project, a community repository we originally developed and help maintain. Photos are sourced from various locations, including the GPO Guide to House and Senate Members, and credited on individual legislator pages. To get the data it’s best to use the congress-legislators project, but you can also get raw Member data in XML from the House and Senate. Also see How To Build an App to Call/Write Congress and Creating congressional district maps with Mapbox which explain how to find someone’s congressional district and how to use that to help them contact their representative or senator. We also compile the only comprehensive database of congressional misconduct, which you can download from GitHub, as well as a pronunciation guide for the names of members of Congress.
Bill Status	The status of pending legislation is retreived daily from the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) GovInfo.gov Bill Status XML Bulk Data. Legislative activity typically appears there the next business day. We use the open source congress project to automate and simplify retrieving the data.
Bill Summaries	We display several sorts of bill summaries, including many that we write ourselves. Other summaries are from the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service (the same summaries on Congress.gov; we get them the same way we get bill status, see above).
Votes	Roll call votes are retrieved from the Senate and House websites in XML format. We update our vote data roughly hourly. We use the open source congress project to automate and simplify retrieving the data.
Bill Text	The text of legislation is retrieved from GPO’s GovInfo.gov in PDF, XML, and plain text formats. We update bill text daily, but text only becomes available typically at a minimum of 1-3 legislative days after major action on the bill and sometimes the delay is much later. We use the open source congress project to automate and simplify retrieving the data, congressxml to render the XML as HTML, and linkify-citations to hyperlink legal citations in bill text.
What’s Coming Up	Our list of bills coming up is from the Senate website and Docs.House.Gov. Upcoming committee meetings are from the Senate website and Docs.House.Gov. Updated daily. All offer XML data.
District Maps	Congressional district boundaries on the maps are from state redistricting data as collected by the American Redistricting Project and the map widget is courtesy of Mapbox (see how we do it).
2015-2022 (114^th-117^th Congresses)
Bill Status	From GPO’s GovInfo.gov via the congress project (see above).
Votes	From the Senate and House websites (see above).
Bill Text	From GPO’s GovInfo.gov (see above).
Bill Summaries	See above. Additionally, some summaries were from the House Republican Conference.
1989-2014 (101^st-113^th Congresses)
Bill Status	Historical bill status information was obtained from the old THOMAS.gov website prior to its shutdown in 2016. This information is no longer available anywhere in a structured data format, but contact us if you are interested in using our historical bill status data.
Votes	From the Senate and House websites (see above). (Except House votes in 1989 (101^st Congress, 1st Session), which are from the Rosenthal & Poole data, see below.)
Bill Text	Bill text from about 2012 forward is from GPO’s GovInfo.gov (see above). For bills from 1989 through about 2012, we display archived HTML text retreived from THOMAS.gov prior to THOMAS.gov’s shutdown in 2016 — although PDFs of bills exist for this time period from GovInfo.gov, the rich text data that we display is no longer available anywhere but you can contact us if you are interested in using ours. (We also display Cato Institute Deepbills for the 113th Congress.)
1973-1988 (93^rd-100^th Congresses)
Bill Status	From THOMAS.gov (see above).
Bill Text	We only display bill text in this time period for bills that had been enacted into law and concurrent resolutions agreed to. We get that text from the Statutes at Large on GPO.gov/FDSys (volumes 87-106; plain text and PDFs).
Votes	Roll call votes in this time period were retrieved from From Rosenthal & Poole’s United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990, Carnegie Mellon University.
1951-1972 (82^nd-92^nd Congresses)
Bills	In this time period we only have a record of bills, joint resolutions, and concurrent resolutions from the Statutes at Large on GPO.gov/FDSys (volumes 65-86). Only enacted bills and joint resolutions and concurrent resolutions agreed to are published in the Statutes at Large. See above.
Votes	From Rosenthal & Poole’s United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 (see above).
1799-1873 (6^th-42^nd Congresses)
Bills	Our data on bills in the early days of the country are from the Library of Congress’s American Memory Century of Lawmaking collection via the am_mem_law project.
Votes	From Rosenthal & Poole’s United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 (see above).