Behind every good search box is a pile of unglamorous work. Over the past few months we've been running every bill we have full text for — going back to sessions that began in 2023 — through a classifier that tags it by policy topic, using the same framework of 21 major categories and 256 subtopics built by the U.S. Policy Agendas Project, adapted for BillTrack50. We've just added these taxonomy categories onto every bill page for bills introduced in sessions from 2023 onwards. The payoff is a taxonomic search that will let you pull, say, every renewable-energy bill or every election-administration bill in Texas and Oklahoma without guessing at keywords. That feature is coming soon, and we've written up how the tags show up on bill pages here.
But we love data, and a corpus of more than 360,000 classified bills is too interesting to leave sitting in a database. To be clear about what we're looking at: this isn't a snapshot of the latest session, it's everything since 2023 — two-plus years and the better part of two election cycles of state and federal lawmaking. So before the search ships, here's a look at what the whole pile actually contains: what statehouses spend their time on, what barely registers, and where red and blue states quietly pull in opposite directions. We're not reproducing the charts here — you can browse the full category-by-category breakdown, with bill counts, on our taxonomy help page.
How much of the cycle is even in yet?
A fair first question: with many 2025–26 sessions still gaveling in and out, is this a complete picture or a half-finished one? The answer is reassuring, and it comes down to a quirk of how legislatures work — bill introductions front-load hard. Most bills are filed in the first year of a biennium and the opening weeks of the second; by early summer of year two, the well is nearly dry even where the session technically runs on.
The numbers bear this out. The last full cycle, 2023–24, produced about 251,000 bills from opening gavel to sine die. The current 2025–26 cycle has already logged roughly 248,000 — about 99% of the previous cycle's entire two-year output — and it isn't over. On volume alone, the current cycle has essentially caught up to a complete one and will likely edge past it.
What's still climbing is what happens after introduction. Around 57,000 bills have passed at least one chamber so far this cycle, against roughly 67,000 last cycle. That gap is the real "sessions still underway" story: the bills are almost all on the table, but legislatures are still working through them. For anyone waiting on the data to fill in before digging through it — it largely already has.
The shape of the agenda
Sort the full 2023-onward set into its major categories and the same handful of buckets rise to the top every time. Law, Crime, and Family Issues is the single largest, touched by about 76,000 bills, followed closely by Government Operations (about 70,000) and Health (about 62,000). Education (47,000) and Banking, Finance, and Domestic Commerce (39,000) round out the top five. (Because a bill can be tagged with more than one major topic, these counts overlap slightly — but the ordering is stable and stark.)
None of that is shocking on its own. What's more telling is what doesn't show up. Immigration, which has dominated national politics for two straight years, is one of the smallest categories in the entire taxonomy — fewer than 4,000 bills, barely 1% of the corpus, down near Foreign Trade and International Affairs at the bottom of the list. That isn't because statehouses don't care; it's because immigration is overwhelmingly a federal fight. As we wrote when Congress poured tens of billions into ICE and the states pushed back, the action states can take tends to get coded elsewhere — as law enforcement, civil rights, or social services — rather than as immigration policy per se. The taxonomy makes that division of labor visible: the topics that fill statehouse calendars are the bread-and-butter ones the federal government largely leaves to them.
Drop down a level to the 256 subtopics and the everyday work of state government comes into focus. The two biggest single buckets in the country are elementary and secondary education and taxation, each with around 30,000 bills — schools and money, the two things every legislature must touch. Right behind them sit criminal prosecution, procedure, and sentencing (about 28,000) and police and law enforcement (about 17,000). After that come the perennials of state life: health insurance, executive branch operations, higher education, employee benefits, and highways. It's a portrait of government doing the unglamorous things it exists to do.
Red states, blue states
The divide gets interesting when you split the corpus by political lean. We grouped states by how they voted for president in 2024 — an imperfect proxy, since plenty of legislatures don't match the top of their ticket, but a useful one. And because a few high-volume blue states (New York alone accounts for about 25,000 bills this cycle, more than any other state) file enormous numbers of bills, raw totals would just measure productivity. So we compare each topic's share within its own bloc — what fraction of red-state bills, versus blue-state bills, touch a given subject.
On that basis, the parties are working from recognizably different to-do lists.
Blue states lean environmental, economic, and protective. The starkest gap in the whole dataset is climate: bills on air pollution and global warming are nearly three times as common, per bill, in blue states as in red ones. Affordable and low-income housing runs about 2.7 times as heavy in blue states — no surprise given the cost-of-living and zoning fights consuming California, New York, and Massachusetts; California's AB 130, a sweeping 2025 housing measure, is the kind of bill that piles up on the blue side of the ledger. Renewable energy is roughly 2.4 times as common — Washington's HB 2251, routing money through the state's cap-and-invest Climate Commitment Act, is typical — union and collective-bargaining bills about 1.9 times, and minimum-wage and fair-labor measures about 1.5 times (see Washington's HB 2479 on recovering unpaid wages). Mental-health and opioid-treatment bills also tilt blue. Taken together, blue legislatures over-index on environment, energy, labor, housing, and social welfare — the contours of a progressive policy agenda.
Red states lean toward order, schools, and the machinery of government. Election and voting administration is one of the clearest tells: those bills are about 1.6 times as common, per bill, in red states — the legislative residue of years of fights over how elections are run, like Oklahoma's HB 1005, which would require photo identification to register. Firearms bills run about 1.45 times as heavy in red states (Oklahoma's SB 372 broadened where residents can lawfully carry), and bills touching gender, identity, and abortion about 1.4 times, reflecting the wave of culture-focused legislation of the last few sessions. K–12 education over-indexes red as well — the home of school-choice, curriculum, and parental-rights bills, like Iowa's HF 2754 expanding education savings accounts and charter schools — as do executive-branch operations and government-efficiency measures, the state-level echo of the federal appetite for restructuring and trimming the bureaucracy.
Step back to the category level and the same pattern holds. Environment, Housing, Energy, Labor, and Social Welfare all skew blue; Law and Crime, Government Operations, Education, and Civil Rights all skew red. Notably, Civil Rights tilts slightly red rather than blue — a reminder that the category captures bills about rights and identity from every direction, not just one.
Where the parties actually agree
The divide isn't the whole story, and the places of agreement may be the more useful finding for anyone trying to anticipate where bipartisan momentum is building.
The cleanest example is technology. Bills on the internet, computing, and — increasingly — artificial intelligence are split almost exactly evenly between red and blue states. AI regulation is one of the few genuinely new frontiers in state law, and so far it's being approached as a shared problem rather than a partisan one: California's SB 53, imposing safety and transparency rules on frontier AI developers, and Nebraska's LB 525, a Conversational Artificial Intelligence Safety Act, became law the same year from opposite political worlds. Government transparency and open-records bills are likewise close to even, as is the broad category of macroeconomics and taxation. And the single biggest education bucket, K–12, while it tilts red, is enormous in both blocs — every state is legislating on its schools, whatever the flavor, right down to the bipartisan rush to get phones out of classrooms (Tennessee's HB 41 is one of dozens).
There's also a quieter point hiding in the volume rankings: prolific legislatures come in both colors. New York and Illinois sit near the top of the bill-count list, but so do Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi. A busy statehouse is not a partisan trait.
What it adds up to
A taxonomy is, in the end, just a way of asking better questions. Counting bills doesn't tell you which ones passed, which mattered, or which were ever meant to. But laid out across 360,000 bills and 256 categories, the pattern is clear enough: state legislatures spend most of their energy on the durable machinery of governing — crime, schools, money, health — while the topics that dominate cable news, immigration chief among them, barely move the needle in statehouses because they live in Washington. And underneath that shared workload, red and blue states are quietly writing different agendas: one tilted toward climate, housing, and labor, the other toward elections, schools, and the size of government.
The new taxonomic search, coming soon, will let you slice all of this for yourself — by topic, by state, by session — instead of taking our word for it. Until then, the full category breakdown and bill counts are on the taxonomy help page.
A few notes on the data: counts are distinct bills, and because a bill can be tagged with as many as two major topics and several subtopics, category totals overlap. Figures cover every bill we've classified to date — those with full text in sessions that began in 2023 or later, spanning the 2023–24 and 2025–26 cycles — and red/blue groupings are based on each state's 2024 presidential result.