One in Nine Bills Introduced by NYS Legislature Becomes Law 

New York State legislators introduce bills for a variety of reasons: They’re personally interested, they want to appease special interests, donors, and constituents, or they want press. But passing bills is hard. Reinvent Albany crunched the data from the 2023-24 legislative session and found that only 11% of the bills introduced were ultimately signed by the Governor.

Notably, only about half of all bills are introduced in only one house, meaning they have no chance of becoming law and are mainly symbolic. For a bill to become law requires both the Senate and Assembly passing it in the same year, and the Governor signing it.

Our analysis of data from the New York State Legislative Research Service (LRS) found:

• Legislators introduced 13,375 bills (we counted the same bill introduced in both houses as one bill). 
• 6,769 bills were introduced in only one house (50.6%).
• 6,606 bills were introduced in both houses (49.4%).
• 1,701 bills passed both houses (12.7%). Five were constitutional amendments that require approval from voters, not the Governor.
• 1,453 bills were signed into law, meaning 243 were vetoed (10.9%). 
• 197 signed bills had approval messages from the Governor, suggesting they could have been substantially modified by a chapter amendment. 

See the graphic below.

Methodology: Reinvent Albany used the Legislative Retrieval System to conduct this analysis. To ensure bills were not double-counted, Reinvent Albany combined separate lists of all 2023 and 2024 bills, then ran a pivot table to filter out any duplicates.

To learn more about chapter amendments, read our blog post, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Chapter Amendments.