How to Cite a Government Website or Report: MLA & APA Examples

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Updated July 7, 2026

Government sources have an author problem. The “author” of a .gov page is an agency, the agency sits inside two or three parent agencies, and the same agency often runs the website that publishes the page — so the one name you have wants to fill every slot in the citation at once. MLA and APA resolve this in nearly opposite ways, and congressional documents add numbered layers (Congress, session, report number) that neither style’s basic template mentions. The MLA Style Center and APA Style both publish official guidance for exactly these sources, and this guide follows it line by line.

The shortest answer: in MLA, record the agency as author exactly as the source presents it, then the rest of the standard template: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Page Title.” Site Name, Day Month Year, URL. If the agency is both the author and the publisher, begin with the title instead and list the agency only as publisher. In-text, cite the first element of the entry — the agency, or the title.

What counts as a government website or report

This format covers anything written and published by a government body: an agency webpage (CDC, Census Bureau, IRS), a standalone agency report or white paper, a congressional report or hearing transcript, a bill on Congress.gov, a public law, an executive order. Federal, state, and local sources all work the same way — so do other countries’ government publications.

A few near neighbors are better cited as something else:

• A PDF report downloaded from an agency site is still a report; the file format changes nothing. If you are wrestling with the PDF itself, see the PDF guide.
• A news article about a government action cites the newspaper, not the government; use the newspaper format.
• A journal article by government scientists is an ordinary journal article — the agency affiliation does not enter the citation.

If the URL ends in .gov (or .mil, or your country’s equivalent) and the content speaks for the government, this page applies.

Information to collect before you cite

Everything you need is on the page or the report’s title page:

• The agency, as the source presents it — spell it out in the entry: “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” not “CDC.” Abbreviations belong in-text, after a first full mention.
• Parent agencies — the chain in the page footer or on the title page (HHS, NIH, NCI). APA needs it to fill the publisher slot; MLA’s research-paper track pyramids it into the author slot.
• Title — the exact page or report title. Standalone reports are italicized in most styles — MLA (title case), APA (sentence case), Chicago, Harvard, and AMA — while IEEE puts report titles in quotation marks and Vancouver leaves them in plain roman type; on-site pages take quotation marks in MLA.
• Publication date — beware the difference between “last updated” (usable) and “last reviewed” (APA says ignore it; more below).
• Report or publication number — NIH Publication No. 18-2059, House Report 615. APA puts it in parentheses after the title; MLA appends it as an optional supplemental element.
• For congressional documents — the Congress number and session (114th Cong., 2nd session).
• URL — and, on govinfo.gov, check for a DOI; APA prefers the DOI when one exists.
• Access date — MLA recommends one whenever the page has no publication date.

The generator at / pulls the title, agency, and date from a pasted .gov URL and formats the rest. Double-check what it captured as the author — agency pages are exactly where automated metadata is messiest.

One government report in all seven styles

The report below is the one APA Style uses on its official “Report by a Government Agency References” page, so the APA row is the official reference verbatim. The MLA row applies the MLA 9 template to the same report: the National Cancer Institute wrote it and its parent agencies published it, so the NCI takes the author slot, and the publication number rides at the end as MLA’s optional supplemental element.

The source: Taking Time: Support for People with Cancer, a patient-education report written by the National Cancer Institute and published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, in 2019 as NIH Publication No. 18-2059, at www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/takingtime.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2026.

Notice what the two lead styles do with the same three names. APA picks the most specific agency (National Cancer Institute) as author and demotes the parents (HHS, NIH) to the publisher slot; if the author and publisher were identical, the publisher would vanish entirely. MLA lists the writing agency as author and, per the MLA Style Center’s publisher-slot rule, records the publisher “as you see it in the source” — you do not split the government out into a separate element. The other five styles agree on the essentials — agency, title, publisher, year, URL — and differ mainly in punctuation and access dates.

The in-text citation for the same report, pointing at page 12:

• MLA: (National Cancer Institute 12) — author and page, no comma, no date; a long agency name may be shortened after a first full mention
• APA: (National Cancer Institute, 2019) or narrative National Cancer Institute (2019)
• Chicago (author-date): (National Cancer Institute 2019, 12)
• Harvard: (National Cancer Institute, 2019, p. 12)
• Vancouver: (1) or superscript numeral
• AMA: superscript numeral only
• IEEE: [1]

How to cite a government website in MLA

MLA 9 gives you two tracks, and knowing both saves you from library guides that only show one. The handbook says student papers citing a handful of government documents may treat them “just like any other source written by an organization” (p. 120), recording the agency’s name as the source presents it. Appendix 2 and research or legal-heavy writing standardize instead: pyramid the name from the largest unit down, comma-separated, starting with the government itself — “United States, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health.”

The student-track templates:

Agency Name. “Page Title.” Site Name, Day Month Year, URL.

Agency Name. Title of Report. Publisher, Year, URL.

One official wrinkle changes the shape entirely: when the organization is both the author and the publisher of the work — a CDC page on the CDC’s own site — MLA says to skip the author slot, begin with the title, and list the agency only as publisher:

“About COVID-19.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13 June 2024, www.cdc.gov/covid/about/index.html.

The in-text citation is the first element of the entry: (National Cancer Institute 12) for an agency-author entry, (“About COVID-19”) for a title-first one. There is no date and no comma before the page number. Long government names may be shortened in-text after a first full mention — spell out “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” in the works-cited entry, then abbreviate in your prose.

The congressional variants, from the MLA Style Center’s own posts:

A congressional report in print. Pyramid the government entity from largest to smallest unit, then italicize the report title:

United States, Congress, House, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Al-Qaeda: The Many Faces of an Islamist Extremist Threat. Government Printing Office, 2006.

For specialist readers, MLA appends the numbered details as an optional supplemental element after the entry: 109th Congress, 2nd session, House Report 615.

A bill on Congress.gov. The site becomes an italicized container, but the bill’s name stays in roman type — MLA italicizes only case names in legal citations, never laws or acts:

United States, Congress, House. Improving Broadband Access for Veterans Act of 2016. Congress.gov, www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/6394/text.

A public law in the Statutes at Large. Two containers, both italicized — the compilation, then the site:

United States, Congress. Public Law 111-122. United States Statutes at Large, vol. 123, 2009, pp. 3480-82. U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-123/pdf/STATUTE-123.pdf.

A hearing or testimony. Cite the committee as author for the full transcript; cite the individual as author when you use one person’s testimony — the Style Center settled this in a post dated 14 February 2024.

When a page has no publication date, MLA’s access date — “Accessed 20 Apr. 2019.” at the end of the entry — is optional but recommended. See the no-date guide for the general rule.

How to cite a government website in APA

APA 7 resolves the author-versus-publisher question with one rule: the most specific agency responsible for the work is the author, and “the names of parent agencies not present in the group author name appear in the source element as the publisher.” Write “National Cancer Institute,” not the full HHS > NIH > NCI chain. When author and publisher are identical — a CDC page published by the CDC — omit the publisher.

The report template, from APA’s official “Report by a Government Agency” page:

Most Specific Agency. (Year). Title of report in sentence case (Report No. 123). Parent Agency, Parent Agency. URL

National Cancer Institute. (2019). Taking time: Support for people with cancer (NIH Publication No. 18-2059). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/takingtime.pdf

The title is italicized and sentence case; the report number sits in parentheses after it, in plain type; and the reference ends at the URL with no closing period.

A webpage on an agency site is simpler: agency as author, webpage title in italics, date, URL. The site name is omitted when it duplicates the author:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, June 13). About COVID-19. https://www.cdc.gov/covid/about/index.html

Two date rules matter more on .gov pages than anywhere else. First, APA says flatly: “Do not include a date of last review in a reference… If a date of last review is noted on a work, ignore it.” A “last updated” date is usable; a “last reviewed” stamp is not, and a page with only a review stamp is an (n.d.) source. Second, add “Retrieved Month Day, Year, from” before the URL only for pages designed to change over time — data dashboards, frequently revised fact sheets — not for stable reports.

Congressional and legal works follow APA’s Bluebook-based legal references (Publication Manual, chapter 11) rather than the report format. A hearing is: Title of hearing, xxx Cong. (Year). URL — and one person’s testimony appends a parenthetical, as in APA’s example: Federal real property reform…, 114th Cong. (2016) (testimony of Norman Dong). In-text, cite the hearing title and year: (Title of Hearing, 2016). For federal documents on govinfo.gov, give the DOI if one is assigned, otherwise the URL.

In-text for ordinary agency sources: (National Cancer Institute, 2019) or narrative National Cancer Institute (2019). To abbreviate a long agency, introduce the abbreviation at first citation — (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2024) — then use (CDC, 2024) after that. The reference entry always spells the name out.

Edge cases

The page has no individual author. That is normal: the agency is the author, and neither style wants you hunting for the staff writer. Only fall back to title-first when there is no identifiable agency at all — or, in MLA, when the agency is both author and publisher. The no-author guide covers the general case.

Three agencies are stacked in the footer. For HHS > NIH > NCI, APA picks the most specific unit as author and moves the unnamed parents to the publisher slot. MLA lets students record the name as the source presents it, or lets specialists pyramid from “United States” down. Pick one convention per paper and keep it.

Your old example says “Government Printing Office.” It is not a typo. The GPO renamed itself the U.S. Government Publishing Office in 2014, and MLA transcribes the publisher as the source states it — so a 2006 document correctly cites “Government Printing Office,” while anything recent should read “U.S. Government Publishing Office.”

The document is on govinfo.gov. GovInfo now assigns DOIs to many federal documents and has added tens of thousands of digitized Serial Set documents — plus more than a thousand congressionally mandated reports — since 2023, so a document you once cited from a scanned PDF may now have a DOI. APA prefers the DOI whenever one exists; in MLA, GovInfo is simply the italicized container site.

Congress.gov offers a built-in “cite this” button. It produces Bluebook, APA, MLA, and Chicago versions — a decent starting point, but check its MLA output against the pyramided government-author form and the roman-type rule for bill names before pasting it into a works-cited list. Raw material, not a final answer.

You need to cite an executive order in MLA. The MLA Style Center’s legal-works guidance authors it as “United States, Executive Office of the President [Barack Obama]” — the officeholder’s name in square brackets — with the rest following the standard template and the order’s designation in roman type.

You need Chicago. The table above shows the author-date reference form the engine produces, which works for agency reports in author-date papers. Legal and public documents proper are a notes-style affair: Chicago 18 covers them in chapter 14 (14.170-14.207) with Bluebook-based notes shaped as Jurisdiction, Issuing Body, Title (Publisher, Date) — the publisher moved into parentheses in the 18th edition — and personal authors following the title after “by.” See notes versus author-date for which system your paper uses.

You need AMA, IEEE, Harvard, or Vancouver. AMA 11 (section 3.13.2) runs agency, italic title, issuing agency, date and publication numbers, then an accessed date and URL — the table’s AMA row shows the shape. IEEE’s report format always includes the report number: J. K. Author, “Title of report,” Abbrev. Name of Co., City, State, Country, Rep. xxx, year. Harvard and Vancouver have no single official body for government sources, so follow the table’s pattern and stay consistent; if your department publishes its own variant, it wins.

The principle underneath all of it: name the most specific body that speaks in the source, spell it out in full, and let your style decide where the parents go — into the publisher slot in APA, into a comma-separated pyramid in MLA, or nowhere at all. Get the agency right and the rest of the entry is just a website citation.

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