How do I find out when regulations change?

Every US state and the federal government publish proposed and adopted rules

in an official journal called a register. That is the authoritative record.

If a rule that applies to your business changes, it appears there first, and

usually nowhere else that you would think to look.

Where the registers are

The federal one is the Federal Register, published every business day at

federalregister.gov. It has a free API and a good search.

Every state runs its own. Most are weekly or monthly, and they vary from a

searchable website to a single typeset PDF. A few examples of what you are

dealing with:

• California posts notices through the Office of Administrative Law.
• New York publishes the State Register as a weekly PDF.
• Texas publishes the Texas Register but refuses automated access to it.
• Massachusetts charges for online access to its Register.
• Hawaii has no central register at all. Rules are filed agency by agency.

Doing it yourself

It is entirely possible, and for a single state it is reasonable.

1. Find your state's register. Searching for "[state] administrative register"

usually gets there in one hop.

2. Check whether it offers email alerts. Some do. They are typically the whole

issue rather than the parts that affect you.

3. Read each issue and find the notices that touch what you do.

4. Note the dates each notice creates: the comment deadline if it is a

proposal, and the compliance date if it is final.

The work is in step three. A single weekly register can carry three hundred

unrelated rulemakings covering everything from dairy inspection to insurance

licensing, and there is no filter for "things that apply to a hardware store

with eight staff".

What makes this hard to keep up with

Registers publish the whole rule, not the change. A notice may run ninety

pages when the thing that actually changed is one sentence, and finding that

sentence means comparing it against the previous version.

Comment periods are short. Thirty days is typical. If you find out after

it closes, the chance to object is gone.

Compliance dates arrive silently. Nothing writes to you when the date you

read about in March arrives in November.

Federal and state both apply. A federal change is often the earliest

signal of a state change to come, because states running their own workplace

safety programs must be at least as strict as the federal standard.

What we do

Regulatory Update reads the federal register and state registers, works out

which sentence changed between versions of a rule, and emails you the ones

that apply to your business, with the deadline attached to your calendar as an

invite. $5 a month.

You do not need us to do any of the above. You need us if you would rather not.