Release 7 – August 2, 2026

Enhanced Race and Ethnicity Data in the CAS API

Starting in 2026 Release 4, Liaison began supporting a new combined race and ethnicity question block to align with the US Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) revised standards. These revisions include:

• Collecting data using a single combined race and ethnicity question, allowing multiple responses.
• Adding Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) as a minimum reporting category, separate and distinct from the White category.
• Allowing the collection of more detail beyond the minimum race and ethnicity reporting categories.

With this enhancement, the CAS API has been updated further to make race and ethnicity data easier to consume and map. The following two new JSON objects are now available under the existing raceAndEthnicities node:

• raceAndEthnicitiesCategories
• raceAndEthnicitiesSubCategories

These objects expose category and subcategory-level values (including the associated category ID for each subcategory) for CASs configured to use race and ethnicity categories and subcategories. This provides a more flexible structure for reporting and downstream integration. Current integrations will continue functioning without change, as this update perserves the existing raceAndEthnicities node for backward compatibility.

Along with this update, the CAS API now includes a new referenceDataId field in each JSON node under the raceAndEthnicity object. This field has been added to the following arrays:

•  raceAndEthnicities
• raceAndEthnicitiesCategories
• raceAndEthnicitiesSubCategories

For more information, see the CAS API Swagger documentation.

Support for Legal Sex in POST Biographic Jumpstart API

The POST Biographic Jumpstart API has been enhanced to support the applicant’s legal sex. A new legalSex JSON object is available in the API data contract, with an answerOption property that accepts the following numeric values: 1 = Male, 2 = Female, 3 = Nonbinary (or Custom), and 4 = Declined to state.

When you submit answerOption in the Jumpstart request, the corresponding text value is written to the application’s gender field, which you can verify by calling the GET Application/{id} API. For example, if you pass "answerOption": 1 in the Jumpstart API, the gender node on the application will be populated with "MALE".

This enhancement provides a standardized way to capture legal sex through the modeled gender blocks while continuing to support CASs that collect gender or legal sex via custom questions. For more information, see the CAS API Swagger documentation.