Welcome to BillTrack50, an easy, fun way to find, track, and share important bills from around the country, Congress, and DC.
If you haven’t registered yet, it’s easy. Simply fill in our tiny registration form and you’re in (if your confirmation email gets eaten by the internet drop us a line and we’ll get you sorted out.)
After you set up your account you’ll be given a choice to conduct a one time search, or to start tracking legislation.
Quick Search
Very Briefly:
The only finesse part of the process is writing a good search. Here’s the search screen again:
The key is to enter words you think should appear in the bills you want to find, like old school google, instead of free form questions or topics. You have some various options for searching:
- Simply enter one word, like Marijuana
- Enter several words, like Student Privacy (you can put commas between your words, or just a space)
- Enter a phrase using quotes like “Minimum Wage” to get exactly that phrase
- Enter a word with a wildcard, like Agricultur*, to get all forms of the word
- Enter a bill number, if you happen to know it (see this post for details about how bill numbers work)
Also notice the “all of” box is actually a drop down list. You can choose “all of” if the bill should have all of your words. You can choose “any of” if any of the words are good enough (like Marijuana Cannabis “Controlled Substances” for example). You can choose “near” if all of the words are required and you want them to be near each other, but they can be in a different order or have other words in between, like Art Education. Don’t worry, you can run as many searches as you like, so just experiment with words and phrases, and look at the bills that come back to see if there are additional words you might want to include.
For more information about how to write a good search see this post, and this post about using “near”.
If you are looking for bills in a specific state enter the state postal code(s) to limit the search (use US for Congress or DC for DC). Leave the states list blank to search the whole database.
You’re ready to push the red Search button and sit back and we’ll find all the bills you should know about. If your search returns more than 500 bills you’ll be told how many bills are in your results, and be shown the first 500. You can click on any column to sort by that column, or click on the magnifying glass right below the search results to filter your results. But mostly you will want to click on the bill number of any bill you want to read about. You’ll be taken to a bill detail page like this. See this post for a complete explanation of our bill detail page. Also notice you can click on any legislator name to see full contact and other information, like this example.
You can run as many searches as you want, you can read as many bills as you need to, and check out as many legislators as interest you. If you want to track and share these bills you’ll need our pro features.
Bill Track Pro
If you choose to save your searches, you’ll be able to review activity on your changes dashboard, and review any of your saved searches anytime. You can also set up alerts and share bills using our various sharing tools.
Here’s a quick peek at what your account looks like after you’ve saved a few searches:
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.