Where bills actually die in Olympia

Most bills introduced in Washington never become law. That's not a scandal. It's how the process is supposed to work. But "most bills die" is the kind of thing everyone repeats and almost nobody puts a number on.

We keep a complete copy of the Washington legislative record, about 95,000 bills across 18 bienniums, back to 1991-92, so we can actually check. Everything below is on the Insights page, for any biennium you like.

The headline number

In the 2023-24 biennium, 2,826 bills were introduced and 846 became law. That's about 30%.

Higher than most people guess. The folk wisdom is that almost nothing passes; the real answer is closer to one in three. It's also lopsided: a lot of what passes is uncontroversial, and the bills people fight about have much worse odds than the average.

The rate moves by biennium. 2025-26 came in around 22%, which is what you'd expect with the 2026 short session just closed and the last bills still working through.

Where the other 70% stop

Every bill that doesn't pass stops somewhere, and the record says where. The two biggest destinations in 2023-24:

Neither surprises anyone who's watched a session. Ways & Means is the Senate's fiscal committee. If a bill costs money it goes there, and there's far more policy than there is money. Rules is the traffic-control committee that decides what reaches a floor vote, and its "X file" is where a bill sits when leadership isn't going to bring it up.

The Rules number is the more interesting one, because a bill in Rules has already passed its committees. It cleared every substantive hurdle and then stopped, without a vote against it, and without anything on its status page saying it's over.

The thing we can't tell you, and won't pretend to

Here's where most "which committee kills the most bills" analysis goes wrong.

The record tells you where a bill finally rested. It doesn't record every committee the bill passed through on the way. So we can say with confidence that 190 bills ended in Senate Ways & Means. We cannot tell you what percentage of bills referred there died there, because the record doesn't say how many were referred in the first place.

That distinction matters. "190 bills ended here" is a fact. "This committee kills X% of what it gets" is a statistic you'd have to invent, and you'd see it repeated for years afterward.

So: destinations, not kill rates. Every number on the Insights page says exactly what it counts. If you see a Washington bill-mortality chart giving a percentage per committee, ask where the denominator came from.

What else the Insights page will tell you

• Sponsor track records: introduced, enacted, and rate per prime sponsor, for anyone with at least three bills. Useful before you ask someone to run your bill.
• What's moving now: bills ordered by how recently they last had recorded action, which during session is the closest thing to a pulse.
• Trends: how many bills on any subject were introduced each biennium back to 1991-92. Type a topic and you can see the 2019-20 and 2023-24 housing spikes as they happened.

What this means for the bill you're tracking

A bill in Rules is not safe. It looks further along than a bill in committee and by the numbers it's about as likely to end there. If your bill is in Rules and nobody with a gavel is championing it, "close to a floor vote" doesn't mean much. The Cutoff page grades it against its real remaining deadline rather than letting the status read as progress.

Fiscal committees are the filter for anything with a cost. A bill can be popular, bipartisan, and dead because there wasn't room in the budget. That's not a fight more testimony wins.

Silence is the normal way a bill dies. Almost nothing gets voted down. It doesn't get scheduled, doesn't get pulled, or runs out of calendar. If you wait for bad news before you worry, the news arrives after it matters. That's the argument for alerts on deadlines rather than on events.

Sponsors vary enormously, and it's mostly not persuasion. The biggest driver is committee chairmanship and majority membership, not anything about the bill. A chair can schedule their own.

It's probably been tried before. Any bill's Prior sessions section shows earlier near-identical introductions and what became of each. Two previous deaths in Ways & Means is real information about the third attempt.

How we count

For anyone who wants to check the method:

• One row per bill, not per version. A bill substituted twice appears as HB 1110, SHB 1110 and E2SHB 1110 in the raw data. Counting those as three inflates every number by about 13%, and unevenly, since the most-rewritten bills are the contested ones.
• Bills only. The record also carries gubernatorial appointments, resolutions, memorials and initiatives, none of which follow the bill path. Leaving them in distorts every rate.
• "Enacted" means it became law; "introduced" means it got a number.
• Committee names are shown the way the Legislature writes them: S Ways & Means, H Rules X. Those are abbreviations, not truncations, and mapping them to full names is guesswork we'd rather not do on your behalf.

Last updated July 30, 2026.