GovInfo USCOURTS API/RSS usage at scale (pricing, limits, bulk options)

[shahzaib-hamid-codesquad]

Hello GovInfo Team,

I’m reaching out because we’re building a product that monitors and processes U.S. court opinions/metadata at scale, and we’re evaluating GovInfo’s USCOURTS collection (RSS + API) as a key source.

We’d love to confirm your current usage model and any scale considerations:

1. API access model (free vs paid)

• Is the GovInfo API fully free to use with an api.data.gov key, or are there any paid/enterprise tiers?
• If pricing is not public, is there someone we should speak with about high-volume usage?

2. Limits & throughput guidance

• Any published or recommended request rates (burst and sustained)
• Quotas associated with api.data.gov keys for GovInfo endpoints (daily/monthly), and how to request higher limits if needed

3. Bulk data options

• Do you provide bulk datasets, dumps/snapshots, or incremental update feeds beyond RSS?
• Recommended approach for backfilling historical data efficiently

4. Compliance / redistribution

• Any constraints on storing, redistributing, or creating derived datasets from GovInfo content/metadata

If helpful, we can share expected volumes and target court coverage so you can advise on best practices.

Thank you,
Shahzaib Hamid
Legal Signal Team
Developer
shahzaib.hamid@xpr.media

[jonquandt]

@shahzaib-hamid-codesquad - here are some initial responses to your questions.

1. API access model (free vs paid)

• Is the GovInfo API fully free to use with an api.data.gov key, or are there any paid/enterprise tiers?

Yes, the GovInfo API is free to use with a GovInfo API key from api.data.gov. There are no paid tiers available.

• If pricing is not public, is there someone we should speak with about high-volume usage? *

N/A

2. Limits & throughput guidance

• Any published or recommended request rates (burst and sustained)
• Quotas associated with api.data.gov keys for GovInfo endpoints (daily/monthly), and how to request higher limits if needed

I will update the API readme, but here are the current default rate limits:

• 36,000 requests per hour (Primary Rate limit)
• 1,200 requests per minute
• 40 requests per second.

To see your current rate limit remaining based on the primary key, refer to the headers described here:
https://api.data.gov/docs/developer-manual/#how-do-i-see-my-current-usage

If you need a higher rate limit, we can discuss temporary increases once we understand the request pattern. Generally speaking though, we have not had to provide users with higher rate limits on an ongoing basis.

3. Bulk data options

• Do you provide bulk datasets, dumps/snapshots, or incremental update feeds beyond RSS?

We do not provide bulk datasets or dumps for USCOURTS materials. If you wish to check for updates on an ongoing basis, you could use the collections service to get a list of updated USCOURTS packages, like so:

https://api.govinfo.gov/collections/USCOURTS/2026-01-20T00:00:00Z?offsetMark=*&pageSize=1000&api_key=DEMO_KEY

You could also filter by courtType, state, or courtCode if you wanted to target your crawls more. Here's an example looking for updates from the United States District Court Eastern District of Louisiana:
https://api.govinfo.gov/collections/USCOURTS/2026-01-20T00:00:00Z?offsetMark=*&pageSize=1000&api_key=DEMO_KEY&courtCode=laed

You could also craft specific queries to the search service that would accomplish the same thing. Something like:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://api.govinfo.gov/search' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'X-Api-Key: DEMO_KEY' \
  -d '{
  "query": "collection:uscourts courtCode:laed lastModified:range(2026-01-20T00:00:00Z,)",
  "pageSize": 100,
  "offsetMark": "*",
  "sorts": [
    {
      "field": "relevancy",
      "sortOrder": "DESC"
    }
  ],
  "historical": true,
  "resultLevel": "default"
}'

This will return a list of USCOURTS granules (opinions) whose packages (cases) have been updated since the UTC time specified in the lastModified parameter.

lastModified is used to indicate the last time this package/granule was updated on GovInfo. This could mean:

• initial publishing of the content
• replacement of the content (frequent in the case of USCOURTS
• when a new opinion added to an existing case results in a replacement of the complete package)
• a metadata edit
• one-off or bulk reprocessing
• republishing/reindexing

This lastModified value should not be considered an official publication date.

• Recommended approach for backfilling historical data efficiently

You could either accomplish this via a search service or use our published service.
For the search endpoint, incorporating publishdate:range(2021-01-01,2021-12-31) (with varying dates) could be used to significantly limit the number of results returned.

The published service, which was built before the search service can do something similar, but the way it is declared is different. Here's an example

https://api.govinfo.gov/published/2021-01-01/2021-12-31?offsetMark=*&pageSize=100&collection=USCOURTS

4. Compliance / redistribution

• Any constraints on storing, redistributing, or creating derived datasets from GovInfo content/metadata

Please see the Public Domain and Copyright statement on our site for more detail, but generally speaking, there are no restrictions on the usage of datasets you derive from our content and metadata.

If helpful, we can share expected volumes and target court coverage so you can advise on best practices.

Sounds good.

Please let me know if there's anything I can clarify.