How Many Laws Has Congress Passed?

A public law applies to the country at large; a private law addresses a named person or small group, usually an immigration or claims matter. Both are counted as laws, and nearly all of them are public — 106 of 108 in this Congress. Figures on this page include both unless stated otherwise.

The 119th Congress (2025–2026) is still sitting. It runs until January 3, 2027, so 108 is a running total, not a final one, and it should not be ranked against the completed Congresses below.

Two different numbers get published as “the percentage of bills that become law,” and the gap between them is not rounding. It depends entirely on what goes in the denominator.

Simple and concurrent resolutions cannot become law. An H.Res. or S.Res. governs one chamber’s own business; a concurrent resolution expresses the sense of both chambers. Neither is presented to the President. In the 119th Congress there are 2,592 of them, and counting them as bills that “failed to become law” understates the rate.

This page leads with the first figure, because the question people ask is about bills. Both are shown because sources differ, and a number you cannot reconcile with another source is a number you cannot cite. If you compare this page with GovTrack or a news article, check which denominator each is using first.

Congress.gov’s law collection begins with the 82nd Congress (1951–1952). The long decline in the chart below is real, and the next section explains why it is not the whole story.

Bill counts only become meaningful from the 93rd Congress (1973–1974). Before then the record holds enacted measures only, so a “share enacted” for earlier Congresses would compute to about 100% and mean nothing. Those rows are left out rather than filled in.

This is the objection to every chart above, and it is a fair one. The number of laws has fallen sharply since the 1950s, but a law is not a fixed unit of work. If Congress now bundles into a few large packages what it once passed as dozens of separate bills, the count would fall while the actual volume of law did not.

That is testable. The page counts below come from the enrolled text of each public law as published by govinfo, and they measure how much law each Congress actually produced rather than how many times it acted.

The empty months are as informative as the busy ones. Congress legislates in bursts around deadlines and leaves long gaps over recess.

Every bill is assigned a single policy area by the Congressional Research Service. Counting the enacted ones shows what actually clears both chambers — which is not the same as what gets introduced, or what gets attention.

Measured from the day a measure is introduced to the day it is signed, across the 108 laws of this Congress. The median is the useful figure here: a handful of bills that sat for years pull the average well above what a typical successful bill experiences.

• This Congress is unfinished. The 119th Congress (2025–2026) runs to January 3, 2027. Its 108 laws are a running total and cannot be compared like-for-like with a completed Congress.
• A law is not a unit of work. Counts say nothing about scope. See the page-count section for the correction.
• Enactment rates start at the 93rd Congress (1973–1974). Earlier records hold enacted measures only, so any rate calculated from them would be close to 100% and would be an artifact of the archive, not a fact about Congress.
• Page counts start at the 104th Congress (1995–1996) and cover public laws only, because that is where govinfo’s collection of enrolled law begins.
• Laws are counted when signed, using the date the measure became law. A bill passed in December and signed in January counts in January.

Sources: law and bill counts from the Congress.gov API; page counts from govinfo, published by the Government Publishing Office. Refreshed daily.