An approach is provided for providing adaptable schema based payloads for state advertisement messages. In some implementations, multiple schemas (e.g., payload data and structure definition) can be used to flexibly and dynamically define advertisement message payloads. For example, the computing device can use advertising message to share and broadcast information between devices by using adaptable schema based payloads. The computing device can store schemas, receive service advertising data, and determine a schema for encoding service advertising data into an advertising message. The computing device can generate the advertising message, encode a schema identifier into the advertising message header, and encode device state data into the advertising message payload according to the determined schema. In some implementations, the computing device can receive advertising message, determine a schema based on a schema identifier in the message, and extract device state data from the advertising message according to the determined schema.