legislation.gov.uk Legislation API

legislation.gov.uk Legislation API

The National Archives publishes UK legislation through a keyless API with permanent URIs for items and sections. The developer page says: "The Legislation API provides consolidated UK legislation, with a few limitations, in a variety of formats for people to reuse." Documents are available as XML, Atom and HTML.

Coverage

Legislation types offered by the site's own search include UK Public General Acts, Local Acts, Private and Personal Acts, Acts of the Scottish Parliament, Acts of Senedd Cymru, Church Measures, Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly, UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland statutory instruments and rules, draft legislation, impact assessments, and legislation originating from the EU. History start, update frequency and delay: Not stated.

Verdict

Machine-readable UK legislation, with permanent URIs you can cite and an XML representation of each document. The developer page says: "It is free for you to reuse, but you should look at the copyright and licensing information." The site footer states: "All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated." Note the carve-out the same footer records: "This site additionally contains content derived from EUR-Lex, reused under the terms of the Commission Decision 2011/833/EU on the reuse of documents from the EU institutions." The site links a Fair use policy, but on 2026-11-09 that page and the copyright page both returned a "Coming Soon" placeholder, so no numeric rate limit is stated. Signal Lab links only.