Terms of service
yourstate.us publishes public records — statutes, regulations, congressional votes, campaign finance and federal spending — and tools for reading them together. By using the site you agree to what follows.
1. What this site is, and is not
It is a reference work. It reproduces and reorganises records published by governments and by academic projects, and adds navigation, comparison and summarisation on top of them.
It is not legal advice, and using it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Nothing here is a substitute for a lawyer who knows your situation. Statutes are amended, repealed and superseded; a provision shown as in force may have changed since it was loaded; courts may read a provision in ways its text does not reveal. Before you act on the law, read it at its official source and, if it matters, ask a lawyer.
Nothing here is financial, tax, investment or political advice either. The site describes what public records say. It does not grade, rank by merit, endorse or oppose any candidate, official or party.
2. Accuracy
We take accuracy seriously and we get things wrong anyway. The data is ingested automatically from official and academic sources, and it can be incomplete, out of date, or misparsed. Coverage varies by state and is described on the site.
Every figure is shown with its source and the period it covers so you can check it. If you find an error, please tell us — corrections are made and, where a figure was materially wrong, noted publicly.
AI-generated summaries are labelled as such. They are produced by a language model from the provision they sit beside, they can be wrong or incomplete, and they are never a substitute for the official text printed next to them. Do not rely on a summary alone.
3. Your account
You need an account only for saved items, watch lists and alerts. When you make one:
- Give accurate information, and keep it current.
- Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
- One person per account. Do not share or transfer it.
- You must be at least 13 years old.
Tell us at privacy@yourstate.us if you think someone else is using your account. You can close it at any time.
4. Acceptable use
Please do not:
- Crawl or scrape the site in a way that ignores robots.txt, evades rate limits, or degrades it for other readers. The sitemaps exist so that a crawler does not have to guess.
- Attempt to break, probe or circumvent the site’s security, or access accounts or data that are not yours.
- Republish the site’s own compilations wholesale as a competing database. The underlying public records are free for anyone to use; the arrangement, the joins and the written material are ours.
- Use the site to break the law, or to harass or endanger anyone named in the records it publishes.
5. Campaign finance data: a restriction that binds you too
The individual contributor information on this site comes from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Federal law — 52 U.S.C. §30111(a)(4) and 11 CFR 104.15 — prohibits using information about individual contributors from those reports for the purpose of soliciting contributions, or for any commercial purpose.
That restriction applies to you as a reader of this site, not only to us as a publisher. You may read it, cite it, report on it and analyse it. You may not harvest it to build a solicitation list or a commercial contact database. We show contributor names, cities, states, employers and occupations, and never street addresses, phone numbers or email addresses.
6. Sources and attribution
Statutes and regulations are government edicts and carry no copyright. Federal data — FEC, Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Treasury, USAspending, the CDC’s vital statistics — are works of the United States government. Roll-call votes come from the Voteview project and legislator records from the unitedstates/congress-legislators project; biographical text comes from Wikipedia and is used under CC BY-SA. Each source is credited where its data appears, and CDC mortality and natality data is used for statistical reporting and analysis only, under the terms attached to it.
The site’s own written material, its arrangement of the data and its software remain ours.
7. Plans and billing
Browsing and searching the records is free. Paid plans add features on top; what each one includes and costs is shown before you subscribe.
If you subscribe:
- Payment is taken by Stripe, on the interval shown at checkout, until you cancel.
- You may cancel at any time from your profile. Cancellation stops the next renewal and your plan runs to the end of the period you already paid for.
- Prices may change, with notice before a renewal at the new price.
- If a payment fails, the plan may be suspended until it is resolved.
Text-message alerts
yourstate.us vote and bill alerts is a text-message program for subscribers to the Personal and Individual plans who add a US mobile number on the alerts page and agree to receive texts. It sends:
- one text for each day Congress sits, once that day’s votes are over, saying how your U.S. representative and senators voted and where the bills you follow moved;
- a one-time code when you ask to confirm a number.
At most one alert text a day, and none on a day when nothing happened; Congress sits on roughly 100 to 180 days a year. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to cancel at any time, or turn texts off on the alerts page; reply START to resume and HELP for help, or write to privacy@yourstate.us. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Alerts are drawn from the House Clerk’s, the Senate’s and the Library of Congress’s public records and can be late or incomplete when they are; they are a convenience, not the official record. See the privacy policy for what is kept.
8. Availability
The site is provided as it is. There is no uptime guarantee, and features may change or be withdrawn. We will not remove something you are paying for without telling you.
9. Disclaimer and limits
To the fullest extent the law allows, the site is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, arising out of your use of the site — including any decision taken in reliance on data or a summary published here. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose.
Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as that jurisdiction permits.
10. Ending it
You can stop using the site and delete your account whenever you like. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and will say why where we can.
11. Changes
These terms may change. The date at the top moves when they do, and material changes affecting account holders are emailed. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.
12. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.