A Guide for Amendments

Each state has its own process for amending legislation; there is no standard that they all follow. Full or Partial? Offered or Adopted? It can be extremely confusing!

The first type of a amendment is a full amendment. This simply means that when the legislature updates a bill, they make the change within the context of the bill and they republish the new version of the full bill with all of the changes included. This allows you to see the entire bill with the new changes in context. On State Net, these full amendments are listed as Text Versions in Bill Resources:

Another method that many states use is a partial amendment process. It's called "partial" because when the state changes the bill, they only republish the part of the bill that is changing. Since the state is not republishing the whole bill, you can only see the changed language. In State Net, we list these type of amendments in Bill Resources as Partial Amendments:

The main difference between the two is being able to see the full bill with changes vs. seeing only the portion of the bill that is being changed.

For example:

California is a full amendment state. If California has a ten page bill and only one line of the ten page bill is amended, the full 10 page bill will be published with the one line change incorporated into the bill. This is nice because you can see the change in the context of the bill.

Oregon, on the other hand, is a partial amendment state. If Oregon has a ten page bill, and only one line of the ten page bill is amended, only the one line that was changed is published. This requires you to then figure out where in the context of the full bill the change was made.

To further complicate things in partial states, there are two different types of amendments: "Offered" and "Adopted". An Offered amendment is a proposed change to a bill. If the offered amendment is not accepted, it does not officially becomes a part of the bill. An Adopted amendment is an amendment that was offered and accepted. Thus it does become a part of the bill.

State Net displays partial amendments in the following states:

AK, AL, AZ, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MS, NE,, NH, NM, OR, PA, TN, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI