How to track a bill in Washington State

About 3,000 bills get introduced in a Washington legislative session. Most of them die. If one of them matters to you, the hard part isn't finding it. It's knowing when it moves, because "moves" usually means a hearing scheduled with a few days' notice, or an amendment that changes what the bill actually does, or a quiet death in a committee you weren't watching that week.

Here's every real way to follow a bill, starting with the free tools the state already gives you.

The free option: the Legislature's own tools

The state publishes everything. Go to app.leg.wa.gov/billinfo, type a bill number, and you get the current status, the sponsor, every version of the text, the amendments, the roll call votes, and the full action history.

There's also Selected Bill Tracking. Make an account with an email address, create a list, add bill numbers to it, and you'll get status changes.

If you're following one or two bills casually, that is genuinely enough, and anyone who tells you a paid tool is the only way to track a Washington bill is selling something.

Where it stops: it tells you a status string changed. It doesn't tell you what the bill would do in plain language, whether the version you read in January is the version on the floor in March, who showed up to testify against it, or that it's four days from a deadline it hasn't cleared.

Tracking a bill in OlympiaTrack

Find it. Search from the bar at the top of any page, or browse Bills by biennium and chamber. Every bill opens the same panel wherever you found it, and the URL is shareable, so you can send someone a link straight to a bill.

Read what it does. The bill panel's left rail has a plain-English AI summary with an impact rating, and directly underneath it the official nonpartisan staff analysis so you can check the summary against the real thing. We put them side by side on purpose.

Add it to a list. Right rail, Add to list. Lists are how everything else finds the bill.

Set your position. Support, Oppose, Monitor, Neutral, or Other, in the right rail. It becomes a sortable column on the Lists page and it's what the vote scorecard measures legislators against.

Turn on the two toggles. At the top of the bill: 🔔 Email and 📅 Calendar. Email folds the bill into your daily digest; Calendar pushes its hearings into your calendar app.

What the daily email actually covers

One email, each morning, only if something happened. For every bill you follow:

• Hearings scheduled in the next two weeks
• New amendments: the ones filed since the last time we looked, not the whole history
• Status changes: any movement in the bill's official status line
• Resurrections: a bill that went dead and came back. These sneak up on people, which is exactly why they're in here.

You can opt in at three levels and they stack: one bill, one committee (Committees page), or an entire list at once. Turn a list on and every bill in it is covered, including ones you add later.

The three things a bill-number list can't do

1. Catch a bill you never heard of. This is the real gap. Write what a list is about in its AI matching notes, and the scanner reads each night's new bills and sets aside the ones that belong. They land in a review tray on the list card. You approve or dismiss, nothing is added on its own. See getting started for how to write notes the matcher can use.

2. Watch a statute instead of a bill. Your client doesn't operate under a bill number, they operate under a chapter of the RCW. Open the RCW reader, find the chapter, and hit watch. You'll hear about any new bill that amends it, whether or not you knew the bill existed. See RCW vs WAC.

3. Tell you a bill is about to die. A status page says "in committee." It doesn't say the committee cutoff is Tuesday. The Cutoff page grades each tracked bill against the real deadline schedule, see session dates and cutoffs.

Watching for bills before anyone hands you a number

Intro Sheets is the daily list of everything introduced that day. During session that's a few dozen bills a day for the first several weeks, and reading them is how lobbyists find the bill nobody flagged.

With AI suggestions on, each bill on the sheet is tagged with which of your lists it might belong to, so you're scanning for chips rather than reading every one-line description.

The honest summary

If you're tracking a handful of bills you already know about, the state's free tools do the job.

What you're paying for here is everything around that: not re-reading a bill to find out it changed, not missing a hearing that was posted on a Thursday, not discovering in April that something you'd never seen amended your client's chapter of the code.

Last updated July 30, 2026.