NOTE: BillTrack50 underwent a major upgrade in 2020 significantly how you navigate around your account. You may find it easier to follow our updated getting started guide here. However if you are here for nostalgic purposes, please carry on.
BillTrack50.com is a website for researching and sharing state and federal legislation. You can search for relevant bills, share them in various ways, and set up alerts to find out when new bills of interest are introduced. Searching and reading bills is free; saving searches and setting up alerts requires a subscription. If you are interested in taking a closer look, sign up for our bi-weekly informational webinar to see all the ways BillTrack50 can transform your legislation and regulation tracking and sharing.
Setting up your account
If you haven’t already, register for your free account. Or if you are part of an organization that is already a subscriber, ask them to invite you.
Searching for legislation
To search for bills simple enter key words into the search box at the top of the screen.
You’ll want to choose words that will actually appear in the bills you are interested. For example enter “firearms” instead of “gun control” because a gun control bill probably won’t contain the actual phrase “gun control”. After you enter your term type enter or click the magnifying glass and you’ll be taken to the quick search screen. On this screen you can narrow your search down to one (or more) specific states. If you would like to limit your search to federal bills choose “United States (US)” from the state list.
One thing to notice on the search screen is that you can choose different kinds of searches. “All of” means all of the words you’ve entered need to be in the bill. If you would like to search for a phrase enter it in quote, like “minimum wage”. “Near” means the words must all appear in your search and must be near each other, typically in the same sentence. “Near” is a good choice when you have a phrase that might be in a different order or possibly include other words, like Sales Tax which appear as Sales and Use Tax in a bill. “Any of” means any of the words are good enough to have a bill qualify for your search. “Any of” is a good choice when you have different ways a topic could be phrased, like “hydraulic fracturing” or fracking. In all cases just enter the words, without commas or anything but a space between them.
Reading legislation
To read a bill of interest simply click on the bill number. You’ll be taken to the bill detail screen where you can see everything about the bill, including the bill text, a list of everything that has happened with it, a list of votes taken, and links of interest to supporting documents on the state legislature site. Notice in particular on the Vote tab that each vote has a detail link that will show you the full results of the vote.
The URL to the bill (something like https://www.billtrack50.com/BillDetail/373322) will always point to that same bill. If a reader clicks on the link they will be taken straight to the bill detail page with no log in step or any other friction to slow them down from seeing the bill.
For a complete run down of the information available on the bill detail page see this post.
You can search for and read as much legislation as you like for free, forever. Same goes for researching legislators (the other choice in the search box, more on that below).
Saving a search
If you would like to stay informed about what is going on with a particular topic, or if you would like to share a whole group of bills, you’ll need to save your search. You’ll see on the quick search a button to save your search. Clicking this button will walk you through a few steps. The first step is choosing a name, so pick something meaningful to you. The next screen is where you enter the words you want to search for. Consider this a rough draft, you’ll be able to try out and refine these words later. If you aren’t already a subscriber you’ll be prompted to either start a free trial or purchase a subscription. The final screen gives you an opportunity to pay online or choose to be invoiced, if you chose to start a new paid subscription.
Once you have saved the search you have three important things you can do. (Full list of features here)
Refine your search and bill list
Once you have saved your search you will have access to the query tab where you can refine your search in many different ways. You can add more search terms in a more sophisticated way, you can filter by just bills that have passed, you can check a box to get historic bills, and so forth. For a full run down of writing searches see this post.
Also, on the main bill grid, there is an x in the first column. Use this x to remove any bills that are not of interest. This will hide bills so they won’t appear in your alerts or widgets.
Set up alerts
On the alerts tab you can request we let you know when certain things happen. You might want us to email you when a new bill gets introduced. Or maybe you want to know whenever one of your saved bills move. Check the appropriate boxes and click save. You can come back and change your settings any time.
We update our data each evening and you will get an alert email each morning. No matter how many searches you save or boxes you check, you will get one email in the morning summarizing everything that happened yesterday.
Share groups of bills
On the widget tab you can grab code to share a list of the bills in a little widget. Notice at the top you have the choice of grabbing a map widget which can make sense if you have bills across the country. To get the snippit of code you need to insert the widget on a web page or into a blog post, click the Generate Script button. (If you are inserting this code into a WordPress blog post, paste it into the text view and save immediately after pasting.) More information is here.
If you would like to share the whole grid and not just a widget you can set up a stakeholder page. Sharing the whole grid lets you add your own comments and share that extra information along with the bills themselves. Read this post about adding columns to your bill sheet. Then you can create a stakeholder page and share it as a link in your post, or embed the whole thing into a web page if that’s what you want to do.
Your bill sheet (and your widgets and stakeholder pages) will automatically have bills added to it if new bills of interest are introduced. If you would like to freeze the bill sheet to only show the current list of bills, go to the manage sheet and archive the bill sheet.
If you want to really do a deep dive you can rate a group of bills as good or bad, and we can make a scorecard for you showing which legislators voted for and against your bills.
Search for and share legislators
Similarly to searching for bills, you can use the search box to search for legislators. Searching for legislators and reviewing their information is also a free service available to all users. Simply type the last name in the box, switch to legislator as the search type, and type enter. From the results screen click on the legislator you would like to see information on. You’ll get their contacts, including social media information, as well as a summary of their legislative activity. The URL to the legislator will always point to this legislator so you can confidently use it in a post or tweet if you want to tell others something about this representative.
Further resources
- A video covering all of the BillTrack50 features is here
- A video covering Scorecards in more depth is here
- The whole collection of mini how to videos is here
- If you are interested in regulations too, see this post
- Register for our webinar, offered monthly, for a walk through both the free and paid features
We are also always happy to help online, in email, or on the phone. Contact Us any time. We’d love to hear from you!
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.