Municode API
Municode documents one REST API, the Aha Meetings API, with per-tenant endpoints over HTTP Basic Auth and no OAuth, sandbox, or self-serve signup. The code-of-ordinances platform itself runs on a private JSON API documented only by a community reverse engineering project.
Frequently asked questions
Municode scores D on the API Report Card. Municode documents one REST API, the Aha Meetings API, with per-tenant endpoints over HTTP Basic Auth and no OAuth, sandbox, or self-serve signup. The code-of-ordinances platform itself runs on a private JSON API documented only by a community reverse engineering project.
Without a usable official API, teams fall back on manual exports, file drops, or one-off vendor integrations. The other option is an unofficial API layer like Supergood that automates the authenticated web app directly.
Municode (Municipal Code Corporation), founded in 1951 in Tallahassee, Florida, is the largest codifier of local-government law in the United States.
Government / Public Sector, specifically the city clerk, town clerk, county clerk, recording secretary, and city attorney offices inside U.S. cities, towns, villages, counties, boroughs, parishes, and special districts. City clerks and codifiers use Municode to send newly adopted ordinances to Municode's editorial team (or process them in-house via Self-Publishing Software), receive a properly numbered/formatted supplement, and publish the updated code to MunicodeNEXT for public consumption.
Very high within its niche. Municode connects "over 4,300 local governments" with their communities (the company's own figure), hosts 3,300+ codified codes on the MunicodeNEXT library, and has been continuously operating for 74 years.
Municode holds the canonical published text of the code of ordinances for 3,300+ U.S. cities, counties, towns, and special districts (out of a national base of ~22,600 local-government entities), spanning the full breadth of municipal law: zoning and land-use regulations (district maps, setback requirements, height limits, density bonuses, overlay districts, parking minimums, sign rules, ADU rules, short-term-rental rules); building and construction regulations (adopted IBC/IRC editions, local amendments, demolition, grading); business licensing (permitted business types, fee schedules, food-service rules, alcohol sales, cannabis dispensaries); animal control and nuisance law (noise, blight, code-enforcement triggers); traffic and parking regulations (residential permit zones, parking-violation fee schedules, speed-limit ordinances); public utilities (water/sewer rates, stormwater, garbage collection rules); parks and recreation rules; alcoholic beverage control; firearms ordinances; tobacco and vaping ordinances; rent control and tenant protections; charter provisions and home-rule authority; and the full history of adopting/superseding ordinances back through (in many cases) the mid-20th century.
Legacy-with-modern-front-end.
No officially documented public API for the code-of-ordinances corpus on library.municode.com, third parties must either contract CivicPlus for a custom data feed or reverse-engineer the private single-page-app JSON endpoints at api.municode.com. A community reverse-engineering project explicitly exists because there is no official documentation, with the maintainer noting that "Municode does not advertise any type of machine-readable API for accessing this content". Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include American Legal Publishing (ALP), General Code (eCode360), Code Publishing Company, Sterling Codifiers, LexisNexis (Municipal Codes), Westlaw (Thomson Reuters). Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.