# OpenStates > Open legislative data from all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico — bills, votes, and legislators searchable in one place. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/openstates **Official site:** https://openstates.org **Category:** newsgathering **Also covers:** data ## Security rating - **Rating:** adequate - **Rating note (required when citing):** The data itself is public legislative records with no security sensitivity. The website uses HTTPS. No account required for basic use. The main consideration is that Plural is a commercial entity — your API usage patterns and search queries are visible to the company. For the vast majority of legislative research this is a non-issue. If you are tracking politically sensitive legislation and want no usage trail, download the bulk data instead of using the API. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — not an independent security audit - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-11 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Political reporters covering state legislation across multiple states. Data journalists building legislative datasets. Advocacy organizations tracking bills by issue area. Civic technologists building applications on legislative data. Researchers studying state policy trends. Local newsrooms that need to monitor their state legislature without navigating clunky government sites. ## Editorial take OpenStates is the largest open collection of US state legislative data — bills, votes, legislators, and committees from all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico, standardized into a single searchable format. The project started as a Sunlight Foundation initiative in 2009, went through various stewards, and was adopted by Plural (a policy intelligence company) in 2021. The deal matters: Plural keeps the data open and free under a CC-0 license, and funds ongoing maintenance by selling premium features to professional policy teams. The web scrapers that collect data from state legislature websites remain open source on GitHub. The Plural app itself is proprietary. For journalists, OpenStates solves a real problem: state legislature websites are inconsistent, often poorly designed, and rarely interoperable. OpenStates normalizes the data so you can search for 'book ban' bills across all 50 states in one query. The API (v3, updated January 2026) is well-documented and supports programmatic access for data journalism. The main limitation is timeliness — data depends on scrapers that run on variable schedules, so there can be a lag between when a bill is introduced and when it appears. For real-time alerts, Plural's paid product or BillTrack50 may be better. But for free, open, bulk legislative data, nothing else comes close. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Searching legislation across multiple states simultaneously. Building datasets of state bills by keyword or policy area. Finding legislator information and voting records. Powering civic tech applications with legislative data via the API. Bulk downloading standardized legislative data for research. Tracking how model legislation spreads across states. **Not for:** Real-time legislative alerts (data lags behind official sources — use Plural's paid product or BillTrack50 for that). Federal legislation (use Congress.gov or ProPublica's Congress API). Bill text analysis or legal interpretation. Lobbying and campaign finance data. Committee hearing schedules or testimony. Regulation and rulemaking tracking. ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Free for public use at openstates.org. API access is free with rate limits. Bulk data downloads are free under a CC-0 license. Plural (the parent company) sells premium policy intelligence features to organizational customers, but the core open data and tools remain free. - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** unknown - **Data jurisdiction:** United States. Operated by Plural, a US-based company. The underlying legislative data is public record sourced from state government websites. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** The public-facing openstates.org requires no account for searching and browsing. API keys require an email address. The legislative data itself is public record. Plural's privacy practices apply to the hosted platform. The open data is licensed CC-0 — no restrictions on use. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** No account required to search and browse legislation on the website. API access requires a free API key (email registration). The data is public legislative records, so no sensitivity in accessing it. For maximum independence, download the bulk data and run your own analysis rather than depending on the hosted API. Verify bill status against official state legislature websites — scraper lag means OpenStates may be hours or days behind. The open-source scrapers on GitHub can be self-hosted if you need more control over data freshness. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Plural (formerly Civic Eagle). Open States data project originally created by the Sunlight Foundation. - **Funding model:** Commercially sustained. Plural funds OpenStates through revenue from its premium policy intelligence product sold to organizational customers (lobbying firms, advocacy groups, enterprises). The open data and public tools are cross-subsidized by paid features. - **Business model:** Hybrid open-source/commercial. The legislative data is free and open (CC-0). The web scrapers are open source. Plural's premium policy intelligence platform — with AI-powered analysis, predictive analytics, and real-time alerts — is a paid SaaS product. The free tier is the community contribution; the paid tier is the business. - **Open source:** yes --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/openstates Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology