Bill Commons Report · 2026 cycle
How State Bills Die
The most common way a state bill ends is not a vote. It is the session adjourning with the bill still sitting in committee — nothing is filed, no action is recorded, the bill just stops. Trackers that read only the action record report those bills as alive indefinitely. This report measures that silence across every state legislature in the country.
Corrected 2 August 2026: the adjournment figure was overstated by 29,227 bills
A bill was marked died_on_adjournment once its session's end date passed. That date is the expected adjournment reported by our upstream source — a prediction, not a recorded sine die. When a chamber sat longer than predicted, the calendar alone marked every live bill in it dead. Massachusetts lost 18,343 bills this way two days after its estimate passed, while its General Court was still filing committee reports.
The national adjournment-death share is now 31.3% of the corpus, down from 45.2%. Death is no longer inferred from a lapsed prediction. It requires the source to report the session as closed; where the source still calls a session active, we publish the bill's action-derived status if the chamber has filed real legislative business in the last 30 days, and nothing at all if it has not.
That last case covers 7,861 bills in Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, which now carry no status. Those chambers have probably adjourned — but "probably" is what produced this error, so the honest answer is that we do not know. The unknown share of the corpus rose from about 5% to 7.3% as a result. Enactment counts are unaffected throughout.
Died on adjournment
31.3%
65,964 bills ran out of clock
Enacted
13.2%
27,787 bills became law
Actively killed
11%
23,218 voted down, vetoed, or withdrawn
Tracked bills
210,716
All 50 states + DC
Read the last two columns together, not separately. Whether a bill that ran out of time lands in Died on adjournment or Killed depends on whether the legislature files an action recording the death — not on what happened to the bill. A clerk who files “Died in Committee” produces a recorded kill; a clerk who files nothing leaves it to the calendar. Both bills met the same end.
14 of the 52 jurisdictions here report zero bills in one of those two columns, which is a reporting convention rather than a legislative one. Compare states using Did not pass, which is unaffected; the split is meaningful only within a single state.
| State | Bills | Enacted | Died on adjournment | Killed | Pending | Did not pass | Enact rate | Adjournment mortality |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minnesota | 10,638 | 146 | 10,271 | 221 | 0 | 98.6% | 1.4% | 96.6% |
| Missouri | 3,175 | 84 | 3,052 | 35 | 4 | 97.2% | 2.6% | 96.1% |
| Hawaii | 6,727 | 296 | 6,423 | 7 | 1 | 95.6% | 4.4% | 95.5% |
| Iowa | 4,363 | 364 | 3,572 | 427 | 0 | 91.7% | 8.3% | 81.9% |
| West Virginia | 2,975 | 295 | 2,665 | 15 | 0 | 90.1% | 9.9% | 89.6% |
| Vermont | 1,718 | 191 | 1,514 | 13 | 0 | 88.9% | 11.1% | 88.1% |
| Kentucky | 1,737 | 204 | 1,503 | 30 | 0 | 88.3% | 11.7% | 86.5% |
| Florida | 1,964 | 230 | 313 | 1,411 | 10 | 87.8% | 11.7% | 15.9% |
| Montana | 6,159 | 780 | 1,865 | 3,514 | 0 | 87.3% | 12.7% | 30.3% |
| Georgia | 5,656 | 743 | 4,596 | 317 | 0 | 86.9% | 13.1% | 81.3% |
| Connecticut | 1,283 | 185 | 1,098 | 0 | 0 | 85.6% | 14.4% | 85.6%* |
| New Mexico | 812 | 124 | 1 | 687 | 0 | 84.7% | 15.3% | 0.1% |
| Rhode Island | 3,020 | 492 | 869 | 1,659 | 0 | 83.7% | 16.3% | 28.8% |
| Indiana | 935 | 164 | 763 | 8 | 0 | 82.5% | 17.5% | 81.6% |
| Oklahoma | 6,005 | 969 | 4,332 | 588 | 116 | 81.9% | 16.1% | 72.1% |
| Mississippiin session | 4,117 | 375 | 0 | 3,304 | 438 | 80.3% | 9.1% | 0%* |
| Nebraska | 1,847 | 362 | 473 | 1,009 | 3 | 80.2% | 19.6% | 25.6% |
| Washington | 3,413 | 690 | 2,722 | 1 | 0 | 79.8% | 20.2% | 79.8% |
| Wisconsinin session | 2,751 | 258 | 1 | 2,132 | 360 | 77.5% | 9.4% | 0% |
| Kansas | 1,483 | 240 | 61 | 1,076 | 106 | 76.7% | 16.2% | 4.1% |
| New Hampshire | 1,394 | 341 | 372 | 674 | 7 | 75% | 24.5% | 26.7% |
| Texas | 12,788 | 1,383 | 8,612 | 255 | 2,538 | 69.3% | 10.8% | 67.3% |
| Maryland | 2,671 | 881 | 1,626 | 164 | 0 | 67% | 33% | 60.9% |
| Wyoming | 335 | 111 | 141 | 83 | 0 | 66.9% | 33.1% | 42.1% |
| South Dakota | 666 | 242 | 313 | 111 | 0 | 63.7% | 36.3% | 47% |
| Maine | 2,451 | 971 | 190 | 1,290 | 0 | 60.4% | 39.6% | 7.8% |
| Alabama | 1,507 | 611 | 833 | 59 | 4 | 59.2% | 40.5% | 55.3% |
| Idaho | 817 | 344 | 444 | 22 | 7 | 57% | 42.1% | 54.3% |
| Oregon | 304 | 142 | 162 | 0 | 0 | 53.3% | 46.7% | 53.3%* |
| Nevada | 1,237 | 532 | 562 | 95 | 48 | 53.1% | 43% | 45.4% |
| Tennessee | 9,112 | 3,942 | 4,255 | 227 | 688 | 49.2% | 43.3% | 46.7% |
| Utah | 1,016 | 512 | 401 | 76 | 27 | 46.9% | 50.4% | 39.5% |
| North Dakota | 1,106 | 606 | 466 | 34 | 0 | 45.2% | 54.8% | 42.1% |
| Arkansas | 281 | 146 | 74 | 37 | 24 | 39.5% | 52% | 26.3% |
| Colorado | 714 | 433 | 269 | 12 | 0 | 39.4% | 60.6% | 37.7% |
| Louisiana | 2,616 | 972 | 850 | 56 | 738 | 34.6% | 37.2% | 32.5% |
| North Carolinain session | 2,338 | 176 | 0 | 642 | 1,520 | 27.5% | 7.5% | 0%* |
| Californiain session | 5,065 | 1,406 | 1 | 1,255 | 2,403 | 24.8% | 27.8% | 0% |
| Arizonain session | 2,190 | 264 | 0 | 337 | 1,589 | 15.4% | 12.1% | 0%* |
| Virginiain session | 3,937 | 972 | 299 | 250 | 2,416 | 13.9% | 24.7% | 7.6% |
| District of Columbiain session | 1,752 | 1,095 | 0 | 98 | 559 | 5.6% | 62.5% | 0%* |
| Alaskain session | 857 | 86 | 0 | 40 | 731 | 4.7% | 10% | 0%* |
| New Jerseyin session | 10,778 | 149 | 0 | 299 | 10,330 | 2.8% | 1.4% | 0%* |
| New Yorkin session | 25,435 | 1,993 | 0 | 589 | 22,853 | 2.3% | 7.8% | 0%* |
| Delawarein session | 1,296 | 512 | 0 | 8 | 776 | 0.6% | 39.5% | 0%* |
| Illinoisin session | 12,793 | 799 | 0 | 43 | 11,951 | 0.3% | 6.2% | 0%* |
| South Carolinain session | 4,047 | 271 | 0 | 6 | 3,770 | 0.1% | 6.7% | 0%* |
| CapDatedJurisdiction6244e0f91778 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Massachusettsin session | 18,852 | 304 | 0 | 1 | 18,547 | 0% | 1.6% | 0%* |
| Michiganin session | 4,060 | 166 | 0 | 0 | 3,894 | 0% | 4.1% | 0% |
| Ohioin session | 2,533 | 99 | 0 | 1 | 2,433 | 0% | 3.9% | 0%* |
| Pennsylvaniain session | 4,978 | 134 | 0 | 0 | 4,844 | 0% | 2.7% | 0% |
States still in session (or whose adjournment date is unconfirmed) naturally show low adjournment mortality — their bills are counted as pending until the gavel falls. Expect these numbers to rise through the fall as more 2026 sessions adjourn.
Methodology
Statuses are derived from each bill's official action record (via Open States / Plural and state sources), then a calendar rule is applied: a bill still at a live stage when its session's confirmed adjournment date passes is marked died_on_adjournment. The rule is deliberately conservative:
- Enrolled bills survive adjournment — governors sign for weeks after sine die, and calling those dead would be the same error in the other direction.
- A real outcome is never overwritten: "died in committee" stays as recorded rather than being flattened into the adjournment bucket, so Killed and Died on adjournment are disjoint.
- Where a session's end date is unconfirmed — mostly two-year carryover biennia where pending bills genuinely roll into year two — nothing is assumed and bills stay Pending.
Full derivation rules are in the methodology, and every underlying bill is public via the free API (/api/v1/stats/mortality reproduces this table). Cite as: Bill Commons, "How State Bills Die," billcommons.org.