How to read a Washington bill number

Somebody sends you "E2SHB 1110" and you're not sure whether that's the same thing as the HB 1110 you've been tracking. It is. Here's how to read the whole thing, and why it matters more than it looks.

The number

House bills start at 1000. Senate bills start at 5000. They're numbered in the order they're introduced, so a low number means it was introduced early, often prefiled in December.

The number never changes. Whatever gets attached to the front of it, HB 1110 and E2SHB 1110 are the same bill at different points in its life.

The base prefix

If you're tracking policy, HB and SB are what matter. The rest show up in search results and mostly aren't what you're looking for. (They're also filtered out of the statistics on the Insights page for exactly that reason: see where bills die.)

The letters in front

This is the part that confuses people. As a bill moves, letters get added to record what happened to its text.

S: Substitute. The committee replaced the entire text with a new version. Extremely common, and not a technicality: a substitute can be a completely different bill under the same number.

2S: Second Substitute. A second committee did it again, usually a policy committee and then a fiscal committee, each rewriting it.

3S exists and is rare.

E: Engrossed. Amendments adopted on the floor have been folded into the text.

They stack, in that order:

• HB 1110: as introduced
• SHB 1110: as substituted in committee
• ESHB 1110: the substitute, then amended on the floor
• 2SHB 1110: substituted twice
• E2SHB 1110: substituted twice, then amended again on the floor

So E2SHB 1110 tells you the bill went through two committees that each rewrote it and then got amended on the floor. That's a bill people fought over.

Why it matters

The prefix is a rough measure of how contested a bill was. A bill that passes as plain HB 1110 went through untouched. E2SHB means three separate rewrites.

More practically: if you read the bill in December and it now has an S on it, you haven't read the bill. The substitute is a different document. This is the most common way people end up supporting something they'd have opposed.

Two things help here. The bill panel always shows the current version, so what you open is what's live. And amendment alerts, the 🔔 Email toggle at the top of the bill, put every newly filed amendment in your morning digest, which is the earliest warning you get that the text is moving under you.

Bill numbers get reused

Each biennium starts numbering over. HB 1110 in 2023-24 is a completely different bill from HB 1110 in 2025-26.

A bill number on its own is ambiguous, which trips up anyone searching old material or reading a memo from a previous year. Always carry the biennium with the number.

This is also why every search and every browse view here asks which biennium you mean, and why the assistant will tell you which session it answered from rather than guessing that you meant the current one.

Finding the earlier attempts

A number that's been reused isn't the same bill, but the idea often has been tried before under a different number entirely, and that history is usually the most useful thing about it.

The Prior sessions & similar bills section on any bill does that lookup: earlier near-identical introductions, each with what became of it, then same-subject relatives. Seeing that this year's housing bill is the third run at the same policy, and that the last two died in Ways & Means, tells you more about its odds than anything on its status page.

After it passes

Once a bill is signed, its status turns into something like C 67 L 25, Chapter 67, Laws of 2025.

At that point the bill number stops being the useful identifier. The law folds into the Revised Code of Washington, and from then on people cite the RCW section, not the bill. If you want to know what a 2025 bill actually did, you eventually end up reading an RCW chapter, and the bill panel links you straight to the sections it changed.

Quick reference

• Four digits, House starts at 1000, Senate at 5000
• S = rewritten in committee: re-read it
• 2S = rewritten in two committees
• E = amended on the floor
• Letters stack: E2SHB = engrossed second substitute house bill
• The number never changes; the version does
• Numbers reset every biennium: always carry the session
• C 67 L 25 means it's law now

Last updated July 30, 2026.