EEOC Guidance API: Enforcement and Policy Guidance as Structured JSON

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission publishes its reading of the statutes it enforces as enforcement guidance, Compliance Manual sections, technical assistance documents and question-and-answer documents. Vaquill AI's US primary law API serves that set under corpusType=AGENCY_GUIDANCE with source=eeoc_guidance. The registry records 179 documents across 4,990 retrieval passages, covering 1970 to 2024, measured per source on 2026-09-07. This post sets out what the source holds, what the API returns for each document, and the one currency signal EEOC actually publishes.

Reviewed and corrected on 12 October 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.

TL;DR

• One filter reaches the set. corpusType=AGENCY_GUIDANCE plus source=eeoc_guidance. The source code is in the deployed OpenAPI enum at https://api.vaquill.ai/external/openapi.json, described there as "EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) Enforcement and Policy Guidance, including Compliance Manual sections".
• 179 documents, 4,990 retrieval passages, 1970 to 2024, per the agency guidance source registry as measured on 2026-09-07.
• This material is sub-regulatory. It is the Commission's interpretation of Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA, the Rehabilitation Act, GINA and the Equal Pay Act. It is not a legislative rule and does not carry the force of one, and courts weigh it by how persuasive they find it rather than deferring to it.
• Seven documents are marked dead and they are retrievable. An actStatus: ["superseded", "rescinded"] query returned exactly 7 results on 12 October 2026, 6 superseded and 1 rescinded, each with goodLawStatus: "not_good_law".
• That marking comes from EEOC's own banner and nothing else. good_law on the other documents means EEOC has not announced a retirement on the document itself. It is not an assertion that the Commission still relies on it.
• Some EEOC documents have left the publisher entirely. The EEOC removed its AI-related technical assistance from eeoc.gov on January 27, 2025, and rescinded its 2024 harassment guidance on January 22, 2026. Neither appears in EEOC's own list of guidance documents any more (see the section on removals below).
• The word "Rescinded" on EEOC's hub page is not a status. It appears there 25 times as a filing instruction about a neighboring Compliance Manual section, in the form "Appears after Rescinded 604".
• Every result carries externalUrl, the eeoc.gov page the document was taken from, so a reader can confirm status at the publisher.

Part of our federal agency guidance series.

For related coverage, see Federal Agency Guidance API for the corpus this source sits in, NLRB Memoranda API for the other federal employment-enforcement guidance set, Legal Data Provenance for how to test where any of it came from, and Amendment History and Point-in-Time Law for what versioning does and does not do here.

What the source holds

Document and passage counts are the per-source measurement published in the agency guidance registry on 2026-09-07. For a current total, take GET /us/statutes/coverage, which is the authoritative counter.

The corpus it sits inside

Those figures are the published coverage numbers, read from GET /api/v1/us/statutes/coverage (measured 2026-10-07 and 2026-10-09), which costs nothing to call. The source filter is what keeps an EEOC query out of the other 52 sources.

The statutes behind the documents

Documents are counted by the authority each one cites, and a single document commonly cites more than one, so these do not sum to 179.

Where guidance sits relative to the law

EEOC guidance is the Commission's interpretation of the statutes it enforces, not those statutes and not a legislative rule. It does not carry the force of a regulation, and a court gives it respect according to how persuasive it finds it rather than deferring to it. Render it in your product as the agency's stated position, and cite the statute or the regulation for the requirement itself.

A short history of EEOC guidance

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was signed on July 2, 1964. The EEOC it created opened its doors a year later, on July 2, 1965, with $2.25 million and about 100 employees. By the agency's own telling it expected around 2,000 charges that first year and got 8,852 (EEOC history, 1964 to 1969).

Here's the catch that shapes everything in this post. Congress gave the agency enforcement duties but no power to write binding substantive rules under Title VII. The Supreme Court said so in 1976, in General Electric Co. v. Gilbert: "Congress, in enacting Title VII, did not confer upon the EEOC authority to promulgate rules or regulations pursuant to that Title." The Court added that this does not make the agency's guidelines worthless, only that courts may give them less weight than regulations that carry the force of law (General Electric v. Gilbert, 1976). Congress overrode Gilbert's holding on pregnancy in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which amended Title VII at 42 U.S.C. 2000e(k). The point about the EEOC's rulemaking authority under Title VII is a separate one and was not part of that change.

So guidance is how the EEOC says what it thinks. And sometimes the Court listens. In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), the Supreme Court held that a "hostile environment" sexual harassment claim is actionable under Title VII, and the Justices leaned on the EEOC's 1980 Guidelines to get there. Quoting Gilbert, they said guidelines like these, "while not controlling upon the courts by reason of their authority, do constitute a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort for guidance" (Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 1986). That sentence is the best one-line summary of how much a Compliance Manual page is worth in a courtroom.

A quick story: one guidance document, three lives

The EEOC approved its Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace in 2024. Two years later, it was gone, and the way it went tells you how to model status.

First, a court. On May 15, 2025, a federal court in Texas (Texas v. EEOC) set aside the parts of the guidance that treated bathroom access based on gender identity and repeated misuse of pronouns as harassment, finding the expanded definition of "sex" contrary to law. The EEOC's own newsroom describes the vacatur as nationwide for those portions (EEOC). The rest of the document stayed.

Then, a vote. On January 22, 2026 the Commission voted 2-1 to rescind the whole guidance. Its Chair said the rescission does not license unlawful harassment and that the employment statutes and Supreme Court precedent remain in place (EEOC press release, January 23, 2026).

The timing is a lesson in how guidance gets made and unmade. A Commission needs a quorum to vote. In January 2025 a Hacker News commenter pointed out that "what it can't do without a quorum is make new rules or issue new guidance," while routine enforcement carried on (SpicyLemonZest, Hacker News, January 2025). The EEOC's own announcement says that Brittany Panuccio, sworn in on October 27, 2025, joined Chair Lucas and Commissioner Kotagal, "restoring the Commission's quorum" (EEOC). Less than three months later came the vote.

For a developer the takeaway is plain. One document had a partial court-ordered change and then a full agency rescission. If your model has a single "is it good law" bit, it can't express that. Keep dates and a reason, and send readers to the publisher to confirm.

Removals: guidance that left the publisher

Not every change shows up as a banner. Two sets of EEOC documents simply disappeared from eeoc.gov in the last two years.

The first is the AI material. A K&L Gates alert of January 31, 2025 reports that on January 27, 2025 the EEOC removed from its website the AI-related guidance it had published in May 2023 on how anti-discrimination law applies to employers' use of AI. We came to the same conclusion in our AI legal regulation update: the EEOC's AI technical-assistance pages now return 404. A check on 12 October 2026 found https://www.eeoc.gov/ai returning 404 as well, and the 2022 ADA technical-assistance document on algorithms and AI also returns 404 at its old /laws/guidance/ address. A stub page at /eeoc-disability-related-resources/artificial-intelligence-and-ada still lists the 2022 titles, but the documents it points to are gone. The statutes did not change. Title VII and the ADA still apply to automated hiring tools, but the Commission's published explanation of how is gone, and none of the 179 guidance pages in EEOC's own sitemap is an AI document.

The second is the 2024 harassment guidance, covered in the story above. EEOC's January 23, 2026 press release says the Commission voted to rescind it, and the document does not appear among the guidance pages in EEOC's sitemap.

If your product shows EEOC guidance on either topic, do not treat a missing document as a gap in your data. Check the publisher. The enumeration for this source is EEOC's own sitemap, so a document EEOC removes drops out of the list of what exists at the source.

Currency: the one signal EEOC publishes

EEOC marks a retired document with a banner on the document itself. That banner is the only machine-readable retirement record the Commission publishes; /rescinded-guidance, /withdrawn-guidance and /laws/guidance/rescinded all return 404.

The API carries that banner as actStatus on each result, and derives goodLawStatus from it.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "guidance",
    "corpusType": "AGENCY_GUIDANCE",
    "source": "eeoc_guidance",
    "actStatus": ["superseded", "rescinded"],
    "limit": 25
  }'

That call returned 7 results when we ran it through the Vaquill MCP server on 2026-10-12, the same seven as on 2026-09-07.

Six superseded and one rescinded, against 172 that carry no EEOC retirement banner. The dead documents stay retrievable rather than being deleted, which is what a compliance diff asking what was lost actually needs.

A worked query

Base URL is https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1. Auth is a bearer key with a vq_key_ prefix, and statutes routes are mounted under /us/statutes/*.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "reasonable accommodation undue hardship",
    "corpusType": "AGENCY_GUIDANCE",
    "source": "eeoc_guidance",
    "limit": 5,
    "excerptChars": 600
  }'

The top hit on 2026-10-12 (fields trimmed to those shown):

{
  "actId": "EEOC_GUIDANCE_TECHNICAL_ASSISTANCE_MANUAL_EMPLOYMENT_PROVISIONS_TITLE_I_AMERICANS_DISABILITIES_ACT",
  "citation": "EEOC-NVTA-1992-2",
  "title": "A Technical Assistance Manual on the Employment Provisions (Title I) of the Americans with Disabilities Act",
  "corpusType": "AGENCY_GUIDANCE",
  "source": "eeoc_guidance",
  "year": 1992,
  "actStatus": "in_force",
  "goodLawStatus": "good_law",
  "effectiveDate": "1992-01-01",
  "wordCount": 50240,
  "externalUrl": "https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/technical-assistance-manual-employment-provisions-title-i-americans-disabilities-act"
}

Take the actId from the response and fetch the full document with GET /us/statutes/section/{actId} or /section/{actId}/body.

Filters that matter for this source

An unrecognized source value is rejected with a 422 rather than silently matching nothing.

Identifiers and citation

actId is the eeoc.gov URL slug, deliberately not EEOC's OLC control number. 178 of the 179 documents print a control number, and those 178 numbers hold only 177 distinct values, because EEOC-NVTA-2016-3 is printed on two unrelated documents. The control number is carried as metadata and surfaces as citation, and the URL slug is what makes the identifier unique.

How the set is enumerated

The enumeration is EEOC's own sitemap filtered to /laws/guidance/, which yields all 179 documents.

EEOC's /eeoc-guidance hub page renders only 56 of them and offers no pager. Those 56 are a strict subset of the 179, so a crawl of the hub would ship under a third of the source and report success. That is the sort of thing a coverage table never shows, which is why the enumeration path is worth stating.

What is not in this source

• Federal-sector appellate decisions. They are decided cases rather than guidance, so they sit outside this source. EEOC's robots.txt disallows its decisions file paths and its site search, and this source follows it.
• EEOC regulations. 29 C.F.R. Parts 1600 and following are regulation text and live in the CFR corpus, not here.
• The statutes themselves. Title VII, the ADA and the ADEA are in the USC corpus.
• Charge data, right-to-sue letters, or litigation filings. None of that is published as guidance and none of it is in this source.
• State fair-employment agency guidance. State material sits in the state corpora, a different query.

Change monitoring

GET /boards costs nothing and returns the watchable registry. The relevant entry is corpusType: "agency_guidance", label "Federal agency guidance", cadence monthly on 12 October 2026, with sourceScopable: true and agencyScopable: true.

A watch on the unscoped board delivers every source in it together, from FDIC letters to IRS notices. To follow EEOC alone, create the watch with scope set to {"source": "eeoc_guidance"}, or {"agency": "eeoc"} to cover every source that agency issues. The pickable values are on the board's sources and agencies arrays. For a lighter signal without a watch, poll changedSince on a search scoped to source=eeoc_guidance.

Where to go next

Full parameter reference, error shapes and the rest of the source registry are in the API overview and the agency guidance coverage page. If your build spans more than one enforcement agency, the federal agency guidance post covers the other 52 sources under the same token, and the employment tooling roundup covers the product side.

FAQ

What is EEOC guidance?

It is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's published interpretation of the statutes it enforces, issued as enforcement guidance, policy guidance, Compliance Manual sections, technical assistance documents and question-and-answer documents. It explains how the Commission reads Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA, the Rehabilitation Act, GINA and the Equal Pay Act. It is sub-regulatory: it is not a legislative rule and does not carry the force of one.

Is EEOC guidance binding on courts?

No. A court weighs it according to how persuasive it finds it rather than deferring to it, because it is the agency's interpretation rather than a rule adopted through notice-and-comment rulemaking. Treat it as the Commission's stated position, and cite the statute or the regulation for the requirement itself.

How many EEOC documents are in the API?

179 documents across 4,990 retrieval passages, covering 1970 to 2024, as measured per source on 2026-09-07 and published in the agency guidance registry. EEOC's own sitemap lists 179 pages under /laws/guidance/ as of 12 October 2026. GET /us/statutes/coverage is the authoritative counter for the whole AGENCY_GUIDANCE total.

Does the API tell me whether a specific EEOC document is still good law?

It tells you what EEOC's own banner says, and nothing beyond that. Seven documents carry a retirement banner and return goodLawStatus: "not_good_law", six superseded and one rescinded. The rest return good_law, which means only that EEOC has published no retirement banner on them, not that the Commission still relies on the guidance. Every result carries externalUrl so status can be confirmed at eeoc.gov.

Are retired EEOC documents removed from the corpus?

No. They stay retrievable and are marked instead, which is what a compliance diff asking what was lost needs. Scope to them positively with actStatus: ["superseded", "rescinded"], or drop them with excludeRepealed: true.

Why should I not trust the word "Rescinded" on EEOC's hub page?

Because on that page it is a filing instruction, not a status. It appears 25 times in the hub's Compliance Manual Section column, each time describing where a neighboring manual section sits, in the form "Appears after Rescinded 604". Reading that column as a status field would retire 25 documents that EEOC has not retired.

How is an EEOC document cited, and what is its actId?

The citation form is the Commission's control number, for example EEOC-NVTA-2001-1, carried on each result as citation. The actId is the eeoc.gov URL slug rather than the control number, because 178 documents print a control number and those numbers hold only 177 distinct values. Take the actId from a search response rather than constructing one.

Can I get an alert when EEOC guidance changes?

Yes. GET /boards lists one agency_guidance board with a monthly cadence. Create a watch on it with scope set to {"source": "eeoc_guidance"} to follow EEOC alone, or leave the scope off to receive every source on the board. Without a watch, you can poll changedSince on a search scoped to source=eeoc_guidance.

Are EEOC federal-sector decisions in this source?

No. Those are decided cases rather than guidance, so they are outside this source. EEOC's robots.txt disallows its decisions file paths and its site search.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.