Open States API v3
Official vendor OpenAPI document · agent-readyData EnrichmentData TransformationapiKey12 EndpointsREST
For Agents
Search U.S. state bills, legislators, committees, and legislative events across all 50 states with normalized fields and jurisdiction filtering.
Use for: Find all bills introduced in California related to housing, Get the legislator representing a specific lat/long coordinate, Retrieve a bill detail by its Open States bill ID, List all committees in the New York State Senate
Not supported: Does not handle federal Congress data, voter registration, or campaign finance - use for U.S. state legislative data only.
Open States API v3 provides programmatic access to U.S. state legislative data, including bills, legislators, committees, events, and jurisdictions across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Agents can search bills by subject or session, retrieve legislator profiles with district information, and pull committee memberships and meeting events. Data is normalized across state legislatures so a single query pattern works for any jurisdiction. The API requires a free API key and is maintained by the Open States project, a civic-tech nonprofit effort.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the Open States API v3 to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Open States API v3, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fopenstates.org%2Fopenstates" | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fopenstates.org%2Fopenstates" | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with Open States API v3 API.
Search state legislative bills by jurisdiction, session, subject, and sponsor
Retrieve detailed bill records by Open States bill ID or jurisdiction-session-bill identifier
Look up state legislators with district, party, chamber, and contact details
Geolocate legislators serving a specific latitude and longitude using the people.geo endpoint
List committees and their memberships for any state legislature
Pull upcoming and historical legislative events and hearings
Use Cases
Patterns agents use Open States API v3 API for, with concrete tasks.
★ Civic Bill Tracking Dashboard
Build a dashboard that tracks legislation across multiple U.S. states by subject area. The /bills endpoint accepts jurisdiction, session, subject, and updated_since filters so a daily job can surface only bills with recent action. Each result includes sponsors, action history, and links to the canonical state record. Coverage spans all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico with a unified schema.
Search /bills for jurisdiction=ca, session=20232024, subject=Housing, and return the 10 most recently updated bills with their sponsors and last action date
Legislator Lookup by Address
Provide constituents with a way to identify their state legislators from a geographic point. The /people.geo endpoint accepts lat and lng query parameters and returns the legislators whose districts contain that coordinate. This supports voter education tools, advocacy platforms, and constituent communication apps without requiring district shapefile management on the client side.
Call GET /people.geo with lat=37.7749 and lng=-122.4194 and return the names, parties, and chambers of legislators serving that point
Committee Membership Research
Researchers and journalists studying state policy can pull committee structures and memberships using /committees and /committees/{committee_id}. Results include the committee chamber, parent committee, subjects, and current member roster with role and party data. Combine with /people for full legislator profiles and /events for committee meeting schedules.
List all committees for jurisdiction=ny via GET /committees and fetch the full membership for the Finance committee
AI Agent Civic Research Assistant
An AI agent answering questions about U.S. state legislation can use Open States v3 through Jentic to search bills, fetch legislator records, and pull event schedules without scraping individual statehouse websites. Jentic resolves the agent's natural-language query into the right /bills, /people, or /events call, supplies the API key from the vault, and returns structured JSON the agent can summarize.
Through Jentic, search 'state bills about renewable energy in Texas' and return the top 5 bills with their summaries and current status
Key Endpoints
12 endpoints — open states api v3 provides programmatic access to u.
METHOD
PATH
DESCRIPTION
GET
/bills
Search state bills with jurisdiction, session, and subject filters
GET
/bills/ocd-bill/{openstates_bill_id}
Retrieve a bill by its Open States bill ID
GET
/people
Search state legislators by name or jurisdiction
GET
/people.geo
Find legislators serving a given lat/lng
GET
/committees
List committees for a jurisdiction
GET
/events
List legislative events and hearings
GET
/jurisdictions
List supported state and territorial jurisdictions
GET
/bills
Search state bills with jurisdiction, session, and subject filters
GET
/bills/ocd-bill/{openstates_bill_id}
Retrieve a bill by its Open States bill ID
GET
/people
Search state legislators by name or jurisdiction
GET
/people.geo
Find legislators serving a given lat/lng
GET
/committees
List committees for a jurisdiction
GET
/events
List legislative events and hearings
GET
/jurisdictions
List supported state and territorial jurisdictions
Why Jentic?
What agents get from Jentic-routed access to this vendor.
Setup
Wiring the Open States API by hand means sending your key on every request and building the query parameters for bills, people, committees, and events across U.S. state legislatures yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import the Open States API from the API Directory, store the key once, and your agent calls it.
Permission scoping
You limit the agent to the operations it needs, such as searching bills or looking up legislators by geography. This surface is read-only state legislative data, so you choose which of the bills, people, committees, and events operations the agent may call.
Credential isolation
Your Open States API key is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'find state bills about housing' or 'look up legislators for an address', and Jentic returns the matching Open States operation with its parameter schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using Open States API v3 API through Jentic.
What authentication does the Open States API v3 use?
Open States v3 uses an API key passed in the X-API-Key header. Keys are free after registration at openstates.org/accounts/signup. Through Jentic, the key is stored encrypted in the vault and injected at request time, so the agent never sees the raw value.
Can I look up a legislator by street address with the Open States API v3?
Not by raw address - the API exposes /people.geo which takes lat and lng. Geocode the address first with a service like Nominatim or Google Geocoding, then pass the coordinates to /people.geo to get matching state legislators.
What are the rate limits for the Open States API v3?
Open States enforces free-tier rate limits documented at docs.openstates.org. Higher request volumes require a paid plan from the Open States project. The /metrics endpoint exposes server-side request statistics.
How do I search for bills about a specific topic with the Open States API v3 through Jentic?
Search Jentic for 'search state bills by subject', load the GET /bills schema, and execute with parameters like jurisdiction, session, and subject. Jentic returns matching results without you needing to read the Open States docs first.
Does the Open States API v3 cover federal Congress?
No - Open States covers only U.S. state and territorial legislatures (50 states, DC, Puerto Rico). For federal bills and members of Congress, use the Congress.gov API. Open States can be used alongside Congress.gov in the same workflow.
How current is the data in the Open States API v3?
Bill and legislator records are updated regularly from each state's official legislative system. The bill objects include updated_at timestamps so you can poll for changes since your last sync.
Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Open States API?
Yes. Because Jentic One is self-hosted, you run your own instance and your own rules decide which Open States operations and credentials the agent may use. Since this surface is read-only state legislative data, you choose whether the agent can reach the bills, people, committees, or events operations, so you can allow bill search and legislator geo lookups while withholding the rest. The agent can only call the operations you have granted it.
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