ABOUT THE UNITED STATES CODE AND THIS WEBSITE

In General

The United States Code is prepared and published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (“OLRC”) of the U.S. House of Representatives pursuant to 2 U.S.C. 285b.

The Code contains the general and permanent laws of the United States, organized into titles based on subject matter. The Code currently consists of 51 titles and five appendices. More information on the content of the Code can be found in the Detailed Guide to the Code.

Printed Version

A complete new edition of the Code (“main edition”) is printed by the Government Printing Office (“GPO”) every six years, and five annual cumulative supplements (designated as Supplements I through V) are printed in intervening years. Each main edition and annual cumulative supplement is current through the laws enacted as of a particular session of Congress, as explained more fully on the title page of each volume.

The printed version is prepared and printed sequentially on a title-by-title basis. The printing of a new main edition or supplement cannot begin until after the corresponding congressional session ends because laws enacted at the end of the session may affect titles at the beginning of the Code. As a result, there is necessarily a lag between the date a law is enacted and the date on which it appears in the printed version of the Code. It can take as long as a year to prepare and print all the titles in a new main edition or annual supplement.

Under 1 U.S.C. 204, the matter set forth in a main edition of the Code (together with its current supplement) establishes the law prima facie, except that the text of titles enacted into positive law is legal evidence of the law.

Online Versions

There are two types of online versions of the Code. By default, the version of the Code that is available for searching and browsing on the United States Code website is the most current of the online versions. The OLRC staff updates this version throughout a congressional session on an ongoing basis as public laws are enacted. Currency information with respect to this most recent version is maintained on the Currency and Updating page.

The other versions of the online Code are related to how the Code is produced for print: namely, new main editions every six years and cumulative annual supplements that reflect changes from each congressional session until the publication of the next main edition. Accordingly, the online versions for each year of coverage on the website (from 1994 forward) contain a merged version of the data from the last main edition published and the latest cumulative supplement, if any (no supplements are published in the year that a main edition is published). Such a merged version can be considered to be a "virtual main" edition. These online versions are produced from the same database used to prepare the printed versions, but there may be differences between a virtual main and the print version of a main edition and any supplement based on data conversion or errors discovered on proofreading (see the Disclaimer below). Given the additional processing time required by the GPO, updated titles are available online in virtual main format before they are available in print volumes.

Disclaimer

While every effort has been made to ensure that the Code database on the website is accurate, those using it for legal research should verify their results against the printed version of the Code available through the GPO Bookstore. The text of recent laws should be verified against the printed slip laws available from GPO, the laws as shown on THOMAS (Library of Congress) and FDsys (GPO), and the final version of the Code when it becomes available.