Session dates, cutoffs, and spotting a bill about to die

Washington's Legislature runs on a fixed clock, and that clock kills more bills than any vote does. If you follow legislation here, the cutoff calendar is the single most useful thing to have memorized, or better, to have something watching for you.

How long each session is

The state constitution sets it:

• Odd-numbered years: 105 days. The long session, where the two-year budget gets written.
• Even-numbered years: 60 days. The short session, a supplemental budget year, and much less room for anything not already moving.

Session convenes on the second Monday in January, every year.

The governor can also call a special session of up to 30 days, which happens when the regular session ends without a budget. Bills can be prefiled from early December.

The cutoffs

Each session both chambers adopt a concurrent resolution setting the deadlines. The structure is always the same. A bill has to clear each of these in order:

1. Policy committee, house of origin
2. Fiscal committee, house of origin
3. House of origin floor
4. Policy committee, opposite house
5. Fiscal committee, opposite house
6. Opposite house floor
7. Sine die: session ends, anything unfinished stops

2026 cutoffs (the 60-day session)

2025 cutoffs (the 105-day session)

Look at the gap in a short session. Five days between policy and fiscal. That's the whole window to get a bill amended, scheduled, and voted out of a second committee.

2027's cutoffs aren't set yet. They're adopted by resolution in the first weeks of session, so nobody has them until the Legislature convenes on January 11.

Seeing which of your bills are at risk

This is what the Cutoff page is for. It takes every bill in your lists, works out what stage it's actually reached, compares that against the real deadline schedule, and sorts them:

• At risk: hasn't cleared the next milestone and the deadline is within a week
• Missed cutoff: the deadline has passed and it hadn't advanced
• Dead: inactive, or the biennium closed without it clearing both chambers
• On track: cleared what it needed to, for now
• Cleared chambers / Signed into law

The at-risk group is the one to read. It's the list of bills where there is still time to do something, which is the only list that changes what your week looks like.

It says at risk, never "dead," and that wording is deliberate. See the exemptions below.

The exemptions, which matter more than people expect

A cutoff is not a law of physics. Several things survive one:

• NTIB: "necessary to implement the budget." Bills deemed necessary to implement the budget are exempt. Whether a bill is NTIB is a judgment call by leadership, and it is a genuinely powerful tool. A bill you wrote off in February can reappear in April.
• The budget bills themselves, and revenue bills, which run on their own schedule.
• Rules. A bill in Rules has already cleared its committee cutoffs and can be pulled any time before the relevant floor cutoff.
• Anything the majority genuinely wants. Language from a dead bill can be amended into a live one. The number dies; the policy doesn't.

So "missed its cutoff" means very likely dead, not certainly dead. That's also why bills you'd written off still deserve an alert. The resurrection notice in the daily email exists for exactly this, and it's the one that most often surprises people.

What to actually do during session

• The week before each cutoff is when committees hold long executive sessions and move a lot of bills at once. That's when to be paying attention.
• After the house-of-origin floor cutoff, the surviving set is roughly what the session is about. Good moment to re-read your lists.
• Sine die in an even year ends the biennium. Bills carry over from the long session to the short one, but at the end of the short session everything that hasn't passed is finished for good and has to be reintroduced next year with a new number.

That last one catches people. A bill from 2025 that didn't pass was still alive in January 2026. The same bill after March 2026 was not, and the Lists page marks it dead accordingly, because the state's own "active" flag doesn't.

Interim

Between sine die and the next January the Legislature isn't in session, but the work doesn't stop. Agencies write the rules implementing everything that just passed, campaigns happen, and prefiling opens in December.

If you only pay attention January through March, you're seeing about half of it. The Agencies & rulemaking section is where the other half lives. See RCW vs WAC.

Last updated July 30, 2026.