US Sentencing Guidelines API: Querying the Manual That Sets Federal Exposure

The US Sentencing Guidelines Manual is available as a queryable corpus of 1,281 documents behind corpusType=SENTENCING_GUIDELINES on the Vaquill AI primary law API: the guideline sections of the Manual plus the Appendix C amendments and former versions. The text it serves is the Commission's 2025 Guidelines Manual (amendments effective November 1, 2025), and the Manual itself changes once a year. That is the whole answer to the retrieval question. The harder question, and the one this post is really about, is what you do with it: the Guidelines have been advisory rather than mandatory since United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), yet a federal judge still has to calculate the range correctly before departing from it, which makes the Manual the number every federal exposure model starts from. If you are building for criminal defense, white-collar practice, or any workflow that has to say "here is the likely federal sentence," you need the Manual as data, plus two other corpora that aren't the Manual.

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

TL;DR

• 1,281 documents, corpusType=SENTENCING_GUIDELINES, serving the 2025 Manual. One of the smaller federal corpora we serve, and one of the highest-impact, because a handful of sections drive the entire arithmetic of a federal sentence.
• The Manual changes on a known date. The Commission submits amendments to Congress, and under 28 U.S.C. § 994(p) they take effect on a date the Commission sets, no earlier than 180 days after submission and no later than November 1 of that year. The 2026 amendments are adopted and carry a November 1, 2026 effective date. You are waiting for a scheduled cutover, not polling a live feed.
• Advisory does not mean optional. A district court must still calculate the range as the starting point, so the Manual anchors the outcome even when the sentence lands elsewhere.
• Application notes are commentary with real interpretive weight, not footnote decoration. Under Stinson v. United States, 508 U.S. 36 (1993), commentary interpreting a guideline is authoritative within limits (the Manual quotes that standard in §1B1.7), so a tool that indexes guideline text and drops the notes is wrong at the exact moment it matters.
• Model four axes, not one: chapter structure, offense level, criminal history category, and the sentencing table that turns the first two into a range in months.
• Scope is narrow on purpose. This is the Manual text. It isn't case law construing it, not the Commission's data reports, and not any state sentencing scheme.

Part of our US primary law corpus series, where each post takes one source and works it end to end.

The post that pairs most closely with this one is the DOJ Justice Manual API guide, since charging policy shapes exposure long before a range does. On the procedural side, see Federal Rules of Procedure API: FRCP, FRE, FRAP, FRCrP, FRBP and Supreme Court Rules.

How these numbers were measured

Every count in this post comes from a live measurement of our own corpus on 12 October 2026, and anyone with a key can re-check it. GET /us/statutes/coverage is free, returns per-corpus counts, and stamps a measuredAt on the response, as the coverage reference sets out. We build this API, so treat the counts as our own published figures and go verify them rather than taking our word for it.

Legal propositions in this post carry their citation inline so you can check them against the source. Case citations are given in full the first time they appear. The Guidelines Manual quotes below were read in the Commission's 2025 Manual PDFs on ussc.gov on 12 October 2026.

Official text, as of 12 October 2026

The Commission's Guidelines page lists the 2025 Guidelines Manual, "incorporating guidelines amendments effective November 1, 2025, and earlier," as the current edition. Its Chapter One says the Manual "is structured to reflect the advisory sentencing scheme established following the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Booker" (543 U.S. 220 (2005)).

What changed in 2025 and 2026. The 2025 Manual removed most of the departures. Chapter One now says: "In 2025, the Commission amended the Guidelines Manual to remove departures and policy statements relating to specific personal characteristics. (See USSG App. C, amendment 836)." Chapter One says courts keep the power to sentence outside the range as variances under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). Not every departure went: the substantial-assistance policy statement, §5K1.1, is still in Chapter Five. Appendix B, Part III of the 2025 Manual compiles the deleted departure provisions as they stood in the 2024 edition. The Commission has also adopted amendments with a November 1, 2026 effective date (its page says the official text will appear in the May 4, 2026 Federal Register), and a separate unmanned aircraft amendment with a March 15, 2027 effective date. Read each amendment's own effective date, because they are not all November 1.

A short history: from parole boards to a grid

Federal sentencing used to be vague on purpose. The Commission's historical introduction to the Manual explains that before 1984 the court imposed an indeterminate sentence and a parole commission decided how much of it the person served, with defendants "often serving only about one-third of the sentence imposed by the court." The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (Title II of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act) set out to replace that with honesty, reasonable uniformity, and proportionality in sentencing. It also created the Commission.

The Commission sent its first guidelines to Congress on April 13, 1987, and they took effect on November 1, 1987 for offenses committed on or after that date. The same introduction describes the yearly rhythm this post is built around: amendments go to Congress "between the beginning of a regular Congressional session and May 1" and "automatically take effect 180 days after submission unless a law is enacted to the contrary." Both quotes come from the original introduction, which the 2025 Manual reprints in Appendix B, Part II (it is no longer in Chapter One). The statute behind that rhythm is 28 U.S.C. § 994(p): an amendment takes effect on a date the Commission specifies, "no earlier than 180 days after being so submitted and no later than the first day of November of the calendar year in which the amendment or modification is submitted," unless Congress changes or disapproves it.

Then came Booker. On January 12, 2005, the Supreme Court cut out the provision that made the Guidelines mandatory and left them advisory. Two years later, in Gall v. United States (decided December 10, 2007), the Court told district judges how to treat them: "a district court should begin all sentencing proceedings by correctly calculating the applicable Guidelines range," and "the Guidelines should be the starting point and the initial benchmark." (Booker, Gall, both at the Library of Congress.) That is the source of the "advisory is not ignorable" point in this post.

What the Guidelines actually are

The United States Sentencing Commission is an independent agency in the judicial branch that promulgates the Guidelines Manual. The Manual tells a federal judge how to convert a conviction into a recommended range expressed in months of imprisonment.

Before 2005, that range was mandatory. Booker severed the provision that made it binding and left the Guidelines advisory.

What survived is more consequential than most product teams assume. A sentencing court still calculates the correct range first, treats it as the starting point, and then considers the statutory factors before choosing a sentence. A miscalculated range is a procedural error that can send a case back on appeal even when the sentence imposed looks reasonable.

A quick story: 77 months, and a range nobody caught

The cleanest example of why the calculation matters is Molina-Martinez v. United States, decided April 20, 2016. The presentence report gave a range of 77 to 96 months. The government asked for 96, the defense for 77, and the judge, with little explanation, picked 77: the bottom. On appeal, the defendant argued for the first time that the range was wrong. It should have been 70 to 87 months, which would have put 77 in the middle, not at the bottom. The Court of Appeals agreed the range was wrong but said he couldn't show it affected his sentence, since 77 was still inside the correct range. Because he had not raised the point earlier, the question was whether he met the plain-error test.

The Supreme Court disagreed. It wrote that "the error itself can, and most often will, be sufficient to show a reasonable probability of a different outcome." It also made a point that matters for anyone building tools: "Given the Guidelines' complexity, a district court's use of an incorrect Guidelines range may go unnoticed." (opinion at the Library of Congress.) A calculator that gets the range right and shows its work is exactly the thing that catches that kind of miss.

What developers say about the grid

Sentencing is a favorite example whenever people on Hacker News argue about whether law can be code. In May 2026 a commenter named jcranmer wrote that "one of the more algorithmic portions of law is sentencing," because the Guidelines let anyone "compute the expected sentence via a calculator." Then came the catch: "the sentencing guidelines are not binding on outcomes, in part because of the necessary flexibility in law" (Hacker News, May 2026). That's a decent summary of the product problem in two sentences: compute the range, and don't pretend it's the sentence.

Another commenter, dragonwriter, made the practical point in March 2024: "the sentenced time for federal crimes tends to be much closer to the result of calculations under the federal sentencing guidelines than it is to the statutory maximum for the charged offenses" (Hacker News, March 2024). Both are opinions from the comment threads of the day, not research, but they match what the Supreme Court said about the starting point.

The amendment cycle

Most legal corpora change whenever a publisher pushes an update, which is why our CFR and Federal Register corpora refresh daily. The Guidelines don't work that way.

The Commission votes amendments, then submits them to Congress between the start of a regular session and May 1. Under 28 U.S.C. § 994(p), unless Congress changes or disapproves them, they take effect on a date the Commission specifies, no earlier than 180 days after submission and no later than November 1 of that year. In practice the Commission's adopted packages carry a November 1 effective date, and the 2026 package does too. The Commission also lists an adopted amendment with a March 15, 2027 effective date, so read the date on each amendment instead of assuming.

That changes the engineering. You aren't polling for drift. You are waiting for a scheduled cutover on a date you can look up in advance.

The structure a developer has to model

The Manual isn't a flat list of rules. Getting the shape right up front saves a rewrite later.

Chapters. The Manual runs Chapters One through Eight. Chapter One holds the introduction and application instructions, Chapter Two holds offense conduct organized by offense type, Chapter Three holds adjustments (role in the offense, obstruction, acceptance of responsibility), Chapter Four holds criminal history, Chapter Five holds the determination of the sentencing range and options including the table itself (Part A), Chapter Six holds sentencing procedures and plea agreements, Chapter Seven covers violations of probation and supervised release, and Chapter Eight covers sentencing of organizations.

The offense-level axis. Chapter Two assigns a base offense level for the offense of conviction, then specific offense characteristics add or subtract levels. Chapter Three adjustments apply on top. The result is a single integer, and the scale runs from level 1 to level 43.

The criminal-history axis. Chapter Four converts prior convictions into criminal history points, and points map to one of six categories, I through VI.

The sentencing table. Chapter Five holds a grid: offense level down one axis, criminal history category across the other, and a range in months in each cell. That grid is the artifact everyone actually wants, and it is why the two axes have to be modeled as first-class fields rather than free text pulled out of a paragraph.

Notice where the chain leaves the Manual. The last two steps run on 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), which is statute, not guideline. A product that stops at the range has done the arithmetic and skipped the law.

Application notes are not decoration

Each guideline is followed by commentary, and the part labeled Application Notes is where the Commission explains what the guideline's terms mean, how to count loss, what counts as a prior, and which adjustments stack.

Stinson v. United States, 508 U.S. 36 (1993) held that commentary interpreting or explaining a guideline is authoritative unless it violates the Constitution or a federal statute, or is inconsistent with or a plainly erroneous reading of the guideline it interprets. In practical terms, the note usually decides the question.

How far that deference reaches has been litigated in the courts of appeals. That argument is case law, which isn't in this corpus. The Manual's own §1B1.7 ("Significance of Commentary") still quotes the Stinson standard. What you get here is the note itself, cited and retrievable, so a human or a model can read the text the argument is about.

Citation form

The Manual is cited as U.S.S.G., sometimes written USSG without periods. A guideline section looks like U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1, with the number decoding as chapter 2, part B, subpart 1, guideline 1.

Subsections carry through in parentheses, so a specific offense characteristic reads U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(1). An application note is cited as commentary, in the form U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1 cmt. n.3.

Because the Manual is republished as an edition, careful practice names the edition when the version matters. That is a real complication and it is worth a section of its own.

The version problem, stated honestly

A citation resolves here to the current text by default, which on 12 October 2026 is the 2025 edition (a search for U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1 returns USSG_S2B1.1, year: 2025, with a sourceUrl on ussc.gov). The corpus also carries the Manual's Appendix C amendments as separate documents, for example U.S.S.G. App. C, amend. 761, effective 2012-11-01. A full prior edition of the Manual is a separate sourcing question from the current text this corpus serves. Amendment History and Point-in-Time Law: What a Legal API Can and Cannot Tell You sets out what any legal API can honestly claim on this.

For most corpora that is a minor limitation. For the Guidelines it is a limitation worth planning around, because federal sentencing has a genuine version question baked into it. Peugh v. United States, 569 U.S. 530 (2013) held that applying a later Manual with a higher range than the one in effect when the offense was committed can violate the Ex Post Facto Clause.

One more rule shapes how a tool should handle editions. The Manual's policy statement on this, §1B1.11, says in the 2025 Manual: "The court shall use the Guidelines Manual in effect on the date that the defendant is sentenced." The exception is an ex post facto problem, and then the court uses the edition in effect when the offense was committed. The same section says an edition "shall be applied in its entirety." A court may not apply "one guideline section from one edition of the Guidelines Manual and another guideline section from a different edition." In software terms: pick one edition per calculation and don't mix.

So a defense workflow sometimes needs the edition in effect years ago. Pass asOf=YYYY-MM-DD to the body endpoint and, for this corpus, the earlier text is a reconstruction: it is rebuilt from the first change we observed after your date, asOf.engine says so, isBounded: true means only that we observed no change affecting your date (not that there was none), and unavailable comes back when the text cannot be rebuilt. Treat it as a lead and confirm the edition against the Commission's own archive of Manuals before a range goes in front of a court. Say that out loud in your product rather than letting a user assume otherwise. Around it sit the per-section change history (GET /us/statutes/section/{actId}/changes), a lastAmendedYear field and yearFrom and yearTo currency filters, which together tell you that a section moved.

One caveat on the year filters across the whole API: they filter on the last amendment year the publisher credits, and about a fifth of sections across the corpus carry no amendment credit at all because some publishers print none. Those sections drop out once either bound is set.

Worked queries

Base URL is https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1, auth is a bearer key, and statutes routes are mounted at /us/statutes/*. Search costs 4 credits per call, coverage is free, and failed calls aren't charged.

Confirm the corpus is there.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/coverage \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_..."

The response lists every corpus type with per-jurisdiction counts and a measuredAt timestamp. On 12 October 2026 it counted 1,281 sections for SENTENCING_GUIDELINES. It is free. The full field list covers the fields on a section.

Find a guideline by its citation.

curl -s -X POST https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1",
    "corpusType": "SENTENCING_GUIDELINES",
    "limit": 2
  }'

Passing a citation as the query resolves it to that section at rank 1. On 12 October 2026 the first result, trimmed:

{
  "actId": "USSG_S2B1.1",
  "citation": "U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1",
  "title": "Larceny, Embezzlement, and Other Forms of Theft; Offenses Involving Stolen Property; ...",
  "year": 2025,
  "actStatus": "in_force",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manual/2025/CHAPTER_2.pdf"
}

Or search in plain words. A query such as loss calculation for fraud offenses with the same corpusType is hybrid, running semantic and keyword retrieval together, which helps when a user asks in plain English and the Manual says "intended loss". Read the citation on each hit: when we ran that query on 12 October 2026 the top three results were Appendix C amendment documents (for example U.S.S.G. App. C, amend. 761, effective 2012-11-01), not §2B1.1 itself. Amendments are part of this corpus, so if you want only current guideline text, search by citation or check actStatus and the citation form.

Then fetch the section. Take the actId from the search response and pass it straight through.

curl -s "https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/section/{actId}/body" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_..."

Take the actId from a search or resolve response rather than building one: the API's own guidance is that hand-built ids usually 404, and the section id reference explains the shape. We did not run the body call for this post, because it needs a key.

Narrow when you know where you are. The search body accepts chapter, part, titleNumber, code, source, matchType, yearFrom, yearTo, limit (max 50), offset (max 70), and fields. Unknown filter values return 422 rather than silently matching nothing, so a typo fails loudly instead of returning an empty array you misread as "no such law."

Paging is cut from a single ranking, so results don't repeat or vanish between pages, per the pagination rules.

What is not in this corpus

Being specific about the gaps is more useful than a coverage number.

That last row is the important one.

The three corpora a defense workflow actually needs

Federal exposure is never a single-source question. A real answer draws on three separate bodies of text that live in three separate corpora here.

The Guidelines Manual gives you the advisory range. Title 18 of the United States Code gives you the statutory maximum and any mandatory minimum, plus the § 3553(a) factors the judge weighs on top of the range. The DOJ Justice Manual gives you the department's own charging, plea, and declination policy, which shapes what the government asks for long before a judge sees the case.

The Justice Manual sits under corpusType=AGENCY_GUIDANCE with source=doj_justice_manual, and it cites in its own native form, like "Justice Manual § 9-27.420" for the plea agreement considerations (a search on 12 October 2026 returned JM_S9-27.420 with that title). The DOJ Justice Manual API guide covers querying it as data, including why its citation form breaks naive parsers; it is worth reading alongside this one if you are building a charging-stage tool.

The query sequence is three calls, and each one is cheap.

# 1. the guideline
-d '{"query":"aggravated identity theft","corpusType":"SENTENCING_GUIDELINES","limit":5}'

# 2. the statute
-d '{"query":"aggravated identity theft penalty","corpusType":"USC","titleNumber":18,"limit":5}'

# 3. the charging policy
-d '{"query":"charging aggravated identity theft","corpusType":"AGENCY_GUIDANCE","source":"doj_justice_manual","limit":5}'

Three corpora, one schema, one actId convention, and each result carries a sourceUrl for the publisher's own copy so a human can check the text against the government's version.

Who this is wrong for

If you need to argue about how the Second Circuit reads a specific application note, this corpus gives you the note. The opinions interpreting it come from a different kind of source.

If you are building state criminal defense tooling, the Guidelines are the wrong book entirely. State sentencing runs on state statutes and, in some states, a state commission's own scheme, and neither is a distinct corpus here.

If your product depends on retrieving the 2018 Manual to run an ex post facto comparison, treat the asOf result as a reconstruction and confirm it against the Commission's archive before you build on it.

Where the corpus sits

This is one of the smaller federal corpora on the API: the US Constitution is 74 sections and the federal rules are 1,130. The largest is the CFR at 222,311 sections on a daily refresh. Federal law totals about 1.5 million sections, inside a corpus of more than 5.3 million sections across 56 state-level jurisdictions and federal law. For this corpus the source is the Commission's own Manual on ussc.gov.

We build the Vaquill AI primary law API. The collection layer behind it is published at open-us-law.

FAQ

Are the US Sentencing Guidelines mandatory?

No. United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), made them advisory. A federal judge still has to calculate the correct range as the starting point and consider it alongside the factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a), and a miscalculated range is a procedural error on appeal.

How often do the Sentencing Guidelines change?

Once a year, on a scheduled date you can look up. The Commission submits amendments to Congress by May 1, and under 28 U.S.C. § 994(p) they take effect on a date it specifies, no earlier than 180 days after submission and no later than November 1, unless Congress acts. The 2026 amendments carry a November 1, 2026 effective date. That is why a fall review gate beats continuous polling.

How do I cite a Guidelines section?

Use U.S.S.G. followed by the section number, as in U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1. Subsections carry through in parentheses. An application note is cited as commentary, in the form U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1 cmt. n.3, and careful practice names the Manual edition where the version is contested.

Do application notes have legal force?

They carry real interpretive weight. Stinson v. United States, 508 U.S. 36 (1993), held that commentary interpreting or explaining a guideline is authoritative unless it violates the Constitution or a federal statute, or is inconsistent with or a plainly erroneous reading of the guideline. How far that deference reaches has been litigated in the courts of appeals, and that argument is case law rather than Manual text. The Manual's §1B1.7 still quotes the Stinson standard.

Can I get a prior edition of the Guidelines Manual from the API?

Partly. The corpus serves the 2025 Manual. Add asOf=YYYY-MM-DD to the section body request and, for this corpus, the earlier text is a reconstruction: it is rebuilt from the first change observed after your date. isBounded: true means we observed no change affecting your date, which is not the same as there having been none, and a date we cannot rebuild comes back unavailable. The Appendix C amendments are separate documents in the corpus. Confirm the edition against the Commission's own archive of Manuals. The per-section change history, a lastAmendedYear field and yearFrom and yearTo filters help you tell that a section moved.

What is the sentencing table?

A grid in Chapter Five of the Manual with final offense level on one axis, running from level 1 to level 43, and criminal history category on the other, running from I to VI. Each cell holds an advisory range in months. Model both axes as typed fields, because they are the inputs everything else feeds.

Is case law about the Guidelines included?

No. The corpus is the Manual text: guidelines, commentary including application notes, and the table. Circuit and Supreme Court decisions construing a guideline are a separate body of law and aren't served by this API.

What else do I need besides the Guidelines for a federal exposure model?

Two things. Title 18 of the United States Code for the statutory maximum, any mandatory minimum, and the § 3553(a) factors, and the DOJ Justice Manual (source=doj_justice_manual) for the department's own charging and plea policy. All three are separate corpora on the same API and the same schema.

How much does a Guidelines query cost?

A search call is 4 credits, per the live pricing endpoint on 12 October 2026. GET /us/statutes/coverage and GET /boards are free, failed calls aren't charged, and each page of a search is a new call at the same price.

Do you cover state sentencing guidelines?

Not as a distinct corpus. State sentencing rules that sit in statutes are served under corpusType=STATE alongside the rest of a state's code, for 56 jurisdictions. A state commission's own published guidelines manual is outside the scope of this corpus.

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.