• Upcoming Bills
  • Methods
    • /upcoming_bills
  • Fields
    • Associated Bill
    • RSS

Upcoming Bills

Bills that have been scheduled by party leadership for upcoming House and Senate floor action. House schedules are taken from the House Majority Leader, and Senate schedules from the Senate Democratic Caucus.

The endpoint will accrue a running history of scheduled bills. Typically, you will want to ask for the latest upcoming bills, sorted by scheduled_at (the time at which we first spotted the bill on the calendar).

Currently, the endpoint defaults to showing only bills in the future and immediate past (7 days ago). If you want different behavior, override the legislative_day filter.

Note: Prior to March 4, 2014, the endpoint deleted old data on scheduled bills automatically.

Methods

All requests require a valid API key, and use the domain:

https://congress.api.sunlightfoundation.com

/upcoming_bills

Filter through upcoming bills in the House and Senate. Filter by any fields below that have a star next to them. All standard operators apply.

Currently, the endpoint defaults to showing only bills in the future and immediate past (7 days ago). If you want different behavior, override the legislative_day filter.

Latest upcoming bills in the House

/upcoming_bills?chamber=house&order=scheduled_at

Any scheduling of a particular bill

/upcoming_bills?bill_id=s968-112

Fields

* = can be used as a filter

{
  "bill_id": "sconres3-113",
  "congress": 113,
  "chamber": "senate",
  "source_type": "senate_daily",
  "legislative_day": "2013-01-21",
  "scheduled_at": "2013-01-15T12:24:51Z",
  "range": "day",
  "context": "The Senate stands in recess under the provisions of S.Con.Res.3.  The Senate will meet at 11:30am on Monday, January 21, 2013 for the Joint Session for the Inaugural Ceremonies.",
  "url": "http://democrats.senate.gov/2013/01/21/senate-floor-schedule-for-monday-january-21-2013/"
}

* scheduled_at
The exact time at which our systems first spotted this bill on the schedule in this chamber and on this legislative day. Currently, we check the schedules every 15 minutes.

* legislative_day
The legislative day this bill is scheduled for. Combine with the range field to understand precision. May be null.

* range
How precise this information is. “day”, “week”, or null.

• range is “day”: bill has been scheduled specifically for the legislative_day.
• range is “week”: bill has been scheduled for the “Week of” the legislative_day.
• range is null: bill has been scheduled at an indefinite time in the future. (legislative_day is null.)

The “legislative day” is a formal construct that is usually, but not always, the same as the calendar day. For example, if a day’s session of Congress runs past midnight, the legislative_day will often stay the same as it was before midnight, until that session adjourns. On January 3rd, it is possible that the same legislative_day could span two Congresses. (This occurred in 2013.)

* congress
The number of the Congress this bill has been scheduled in.

* chamber
The chamber which has scheduled this bill.

* source_type
The source for this information. “house_daily” (Majority Leader daily schedule or “senate_daily” (Senate Democrats’ Floor feed.

context
(Senate only) Some context for what kind of activity will be occurring to the bill.

url
A permalink for this information. For the House, this may be a PDF.

Associated Bill

{
  "bill_id": "hr41-113",
  "bill": {
    "bill_id": "hr41-113",
    "bill_type": "hr",
    "congress": 113
    ...
  }
}

* bill_id
The ID of the bill that is being scheduled.

bill
Some basic fields about the bill that is being scheduled.

RSS

If experimental RSS support is enabled, the following field->RSS mapping will be used by default: