Unlocking the Value
in Public Information

Introducing the Column API

Read Access to
Public Information

Our API helps you focus on building with information that matters and not waste time maintaining text parsers and GIS datasets.

Housing Insights

Economic Insights

Population Insights

Legal Records

Public Records

Start Using the Column API for Free

Get started by registering an account to authenticate and receive a token for subsequent API requests. Token-based authentication is used to secure the API and ensure that only authorized users have access.

 

Releases

1.4: Open Street Map

Open Street Map (OSM) is an incredibly powerful open-source geospatial platform, backed by a community of mappers. One of the most exciting parts of Open Street Map is the Overpass API, a read-only API for querying parts of the OSM map data like Points of Interest (POIs). We’ve ingested, processed, structured, and exposed all POIs in the US available on Open Street Map, and we’ve made them available with simple queries in Column’s API.

1.3: America Housing Survey Data

The American Housing Survey is a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau which gives a detailed look at housing trends in the United States. We’ve loaded, parsed and data from the American Housing Survey for 2017, 2019 and 2021. Additionally, we’ve split out the sections of the dataset that are all currently combined into one massive table into separate API endpoints.

1.2: Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports

ACFRs are PDFs with hundreds of pages. They detail everything from outstanding bonds, construction projects, and projected taxation rates. We’ve compiled over 1000 ACFRs from counties in all 50 states, extracted the net position statements, converted the tables to CSV format, and added them to our API.

1.1: Healthcare Provider Negotiated Rates

As of July 1st 2022, the federal government introduced a new disclosure requirement: all health insurance providers must disclose their negotiated rates with all healthcare providers across the US. We’ve removed the burden of scraping, structuring, formatting, and compressing large swaths of negotiated rate information and opened it up to the public.

Join the Column API Newsletter

Every other week, following each engineering sprint on the Column API, you can expect this hear from us about important updates to our API functionality and get early access to new data sets we’ve released.