Congress is 535 elected members in two chambers. A bill becomes law only when both pass the same words.
The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each elected by one district. The Senate has 100, two from every state. Each chamber sets its own rules, and each needs more than a bare majority for some things. Seats below are as of Nov 4, 2026.
House: 214 Democrats, 218 Republicans, 1 independents. Senate: 45 Democrats, 51 Republicans, 2 independents.
218 in the House, 51 in the Senate (or 50 plus the Vice President) passes a bill under regular order, elects the Speaker and organizes committees. The majority party chairs every committee and controls what reaches the floor.
Cloture, to end debate. Any senator can hold up most bills by refusing to stop debating, the filibuster. Ending it takes 60 votes, so most Senate bills need some support from the minority party.
290 in the House, 67 in the Senate overrides a veto. Two-thirds of those voting also passes a House bill under suspension of the rules, the fast lane most House bills use.
The whole House is elected every two years. Senators serve six, a third at a time.
Each two-year term is one numbered Congress. It starts on January 3 after an election. Every bill not passed by the end of a Congress dies and has to be introduced again, which is why this site counts bills by Congress. House seats are divided among the states by population after each census.
The House turns over fastest. All 435 seats are up every even year, so House majorities respond to the national mood within two years.
The Senate changes slowly by design. Only about 33 seats are up in any election. Senators are split into three classes, and a class serves six years.
When one party held the House, the Senate and the White House, Congress enacted more laws.
The majority in each chamber decides which bills get a hearing and a vote. Control has often been split since 2013.
Unified government passed more. The two completed Congresses where one party held both chambers and the presidency enacted 365 and 443 laws; divided Congresses enacted 274 to 344.
Majorities have been thin. A shift of a handful of seats can change which party sets the agenda in either chamber.
Sponsors in the majority do better. On the Outcomes page, bills from majority-party sponsors become law far more often than bills from the minority.
Of 76,867 bills introduced from 2013 to 2024, 2,051 became law.
The rest of this page follows the route every bill takes through Congress and counts how many made it past each stage. It uses the 113th to 118th Congress, which have finished, so every bill here has a final outcome.
87% of bills never left committee. No committee report, no floor time. Introducing a bill is easy; a member needs only to drop it in the hopper.
Passing one chamber is not halfway. Of bills that passed their own chamber, 65% died in the other one.
The end of the route is nearly automatic. Of the 2,117 bills that cleared both chambers, 2,051 became law and 33 were vetoed.
Every bill follows the same six stages, and the field narrows hardest at the first gate.
House bills and Senate bills run the same route in mirror image. Band height is the number of bills still alive, drawn to one scale, so the thin blue sliver at the end is the true size of the law column.
Bills can skip a stage: 1,009 bills passed a chamber with no recorded committee report or discharge, mostly Senate bills passed by unanimous consent soon after introduction. They are counted at every later stage they reached. Days below the route are the median time each leg took for the 2,051 bills that became law.
Committee is the hardest gate. A bill that clears both chambers almost always becomes law.
Committee chairs decide most outcomes. Only 12% of bills get a committee report or discharge. A chair who never schedules a markup ends a bill without a vote.
The second chamber is the next wall. Most bills that pass one chamber wait in the other until the Congress ends.
Vetoes are rare. Presidents vetoed 33 bills in these Congresses. A bill that reaches the President has usually been negotiated with the White House already.
A typical law takes about 9 months, and most of that time passes before the first floor vote.
The wait is up front. The median law spent 120 days between introduction and its first chamber vote, and 63 more waiting on the other chamber.
The last two steps take about two weeks. Enrolling and presenting the bill takes a median 6 days, and the President signs a median 6 days later.
The spread is wide. A quarter of laws took more than 431 days, and some passed both chambers within a week of introduction.
More than a quarter of each Congress's laws pass in its final December.
Each Congress lasts two years. Bills still pending when it ends die. The deadline pulls work to the end: the weeks after the election, the lame-duck session, are the busiest of the term.
587 laws were enacted in the final December, 29% of the total. Another 195 were signed in the January after, as Congress adjourned.
Introductions run the other way. Members file the most bills in the first months of a Congress, when the field is open. Each grey line starts where its bill was filed.
The steep right edge is the deadline. Bills from every month of the term converge on the same few weeks.
Most bills pass through procedural fast lanes meant for measures nobody fights over.
A contested bill in the House needs a rule from the Rules Committee and hours of debate. A contested bill in the Senate can face a filibuster that takes 60 votes to end. Most bills avoid both.
House suspension limits debate to 40 minutes, bars amendments, and needs a two-thirds vote. It is the default route for bills with broad support.
Senate unanimous consent passes a bill with no roll call if no senator objects. One objection sends it back to the regular process.
Conference committees have nearly disappeared. Only 18 laws went through one.
Members file 82% more bills than they did in 2013. Congress enacts about the same number.
The 119th Congress is still in session and is shown outlined, for context only; its bills can still move. It is left out of every exhibit in the path of a bill except these two and Exhibit 4.
Nearly one law in four names a post office, a clinic or a park, or mints a coin.
Government Operations and Politics leads because of naming bills. 405 of its 580 laws name a building or a place. Naming a post office alone accounts for 376 laws.
Big policy moves in big packages. Spending bills and the annual defense authorization carry the text of many smaller bills.
A bill that died may still have become law. 644 bills that never passed had an identical companion bill that did.
Terms used on this site
- Bill (H.R., S.)
- A proposed law. H.R. starts in the House, S. in the Senate.
- Joint resolution (H.J.Res., S.J.Res.)
- Works like a bill. Used for constitutional amendments, disapproving regulations and some spending.
- Referred
- Sent to a committee for review. Nearly every bill is referred the day it is introduced.
- Markup and report
- The committee amends the bill and votes to send it to the floor with a written report.
- Discharged
- Taken from a committee without its report, by consent or by petition.
- Suspension of the rules
- House fast lane: 40 minutes of debate, no amendments, two-thirds needed to pass.
- Unanimous consent
- Senate fast lane: passes with no roll call unless one senator objects.
- Cloture
- The Senate vote to end debate. Needs 60 votes for most bills.
- Conference
- Members of both chambers write one final version. Now rare.
- Enrolled bill
- The final text both chambers passed, printed and signed by their leaders for the President.
- Veto and override
- The President returns the bill unsigned. Two-thirds of both chambers can make it law anyway.
- Pocket veto
- If Congress adjourns within the 10 days and the President does not sign, the bill dies.
Stages are read from each bill's action history [1]: committee reports and discharges, passage in each chamber, presentation to the President, and enactment. Fast lanes are House passages whose actions record a motion to suspend the rules and pass, and Senate passages recorded as by unanimous consent. Naming laws are titles that designate or name a facility, place or building, or authorize a commemorative coin. Party control uses the majority party of each chamber and the President's party; the Senate split of the 117th Congress counts the Vice President's tie-breaking vote. [5] congress-legislators, a public dataset of members of Congress maintained on GitHub.