The 2025 and 2026 legislative wave

Every measure in every state file is included if the session it belongs to names 2025 or 2026. That is the whole rule. It catches a regular session, a numbered legislature whose session line carries the year, and a two year biennium that spans both, and it excludes a bill introduced earlier even when the story about it ran recently.

20 measures qualify at the moment this page was built: 14 reached the statute book and 6 did not. Those figures are the length of the two tables below rather than a separate assertion, so the tables and the sentence cannot come apart. The list covers only researched states, and the research set is not a random sample of the country, so it is a record of what this site has read rather than a census of what legislatures did.

Each state name links to its own record, where the bill appears in full with its summary, its vote history, and the documents behind it. Nothing in this table is summarized twice; it is an index into the deep pages, not a replacement for them.

Read the two date columns above against each other and the wave looks different from the way it was reported. Of the 13 signed measures that record both dates, 11 do not take effect on the day of signature, 1 takes effect immediately, and 1 reaches backwards to a date already past.

The longest wait belongs to Texas, whose HB1056 was signed on June 22, 2025 and does not commence until September 1, 2026, a gap of 436 days.

Staging is not an accident of drafting. A bill that requires an agency to build something, write rules, or issue an instrument needs the runway, and a bill with a fiscal cost is often pushed into the next budget year to keep it out of the current one. The consequence for a reader is blunt: a headline dated the day of the signature describes a state of the law that will not exist for months, and the gap computed above is the current worst case.

Two bills show the pattern at its sharpest. Texas split the commencement inside a single act, so the legal tender declaration and the transactional currency system it authorizes begin on different dates, neither of them the signing date. Washington ran the same mechanism in the opposite direction, repealing a longstanding preference with a commencement set for the start of the following calendar year, which gave the market months of notice and gave the state a clean tax year boundary.

A wave counted in states that joined it hides the states that left it, and the second group is smaller but more instructive.

Washington repealed its bullion preference outright, in a broad bill about eliminating obsolete tax preferences rather than a bill about metals, and the state Department of Revenue issued a notice telling sellers the tax now applies. A repeal that arrives inside a general tax administration act will never be covered as a sound money story, and it changes the answer for a buyer just as completely as an exemption would.

Maryland did both things in two years. A 2025 budget reconciliation act tightened the existing bullion exemption by adding a location condition on top of the price floor it already carried, and a 2026 act repealed that condition and left the floor in place. The state ended where it started, minus an intervening year in which the exemption was materially narrower, and the interim rule is still visible in one of the General Assembly's own statute lookup tools.

Neither of those is a reversal of sentiment. Both are what happens when a bullion provision lives inside a general revenue vehicle and gets moved by the vehicle's priorities rather than its own.

The failures carry as much information as the enactments, and they disappear from every running count. A bill that passes both chambers and is vetoed tells you something a bill that never got a hearing does not, so the disposition is spelled out for each.

Pending is not a synonym for dying. A measure carried over between the two years of a biennium is still alive on its chamber's calendar, and this site does not classify a state on the strength of one. A vetoed measure is dead unless an override happened, and where a veto was sustained the state record says on what date and whether a motion to reconsider was even made.

There is no editorial step between a state record changing and this page changing. Both tables, the three commencement buckets, the longest gap, and every figure in the prose are computed from the measures in the state files at build time. Adding a bill to a state's record adds a row here. Correcting an effective date moves the arithmetic in section 3. Nothing needs to be remembered.

What that does not fix is coverage. A measure can only appear here if its state has been researched, and most have not been. When a state is added the wave will look larger, not because more happened but because more was read. The about page gives the current figure, the methodology page explains why the denominator is stated everywhere, and the fifty state table shows which states carry no finding at all.