GLOGood Lookin’ Out

Washington regulations: details

Copied from the state’s website on September 20, 2026. Check the official page before you rely on a rule.

What is here

73,474 entries copied from 2,854 complete-chapter pages on the Washington State Legislature’s WAC website, published by the Office of the Code Reviser, covering 175 titles.
WASHINGTON’S OFFICIAL TEXT IS THE CODE REVISER’S CERTIFIED PDF, NOT THIS WEB TEXT. The state says so itself and calls the web version the working copy. We copied the web version. We do not hold the certified PDFs, and nothing here is the official Code.
51,601 entries are sections — rules as the state prints them. 463 of those carry no text at all: the state prints the number and heading and nothing else.
21,873 entries are NOT RULES. They are rows of the tables each chapter prints under “Disposition of sections formerly codified”: the state’s own record that a NUMBER was repealed, decodified or moved. They carry no rule text, and they share the same citation space as live sections — 16 numbers carry both a disposition row and a live section. Every one of them says on its face that it is not a rule.
109 sections carry the state’s version parenthetical, in two kinds that must not be read as one. 45 numbers are printed TWICE, one copy “Effective until” a date and one “Effective” from it; both copies are here, each with its own text and history, and we never tell you which is in force. The other 19 are printed ONCE and labelled effective on a date still in the future — all 15 rules of chapter 182-40 (January 1, 2027) and 246-945-026 through -029 (January 22, 2027). Those rules have not taken effect, we hold no earlier version of them, and each one says so.
Each entry’s history block, the bracketed [Statutory Authority …] note, is kept apart from the rule text and never merged into it. Not one entry is missing one.

How we checked it

We compared all 73,474 entries against a second program written separately to read the same pages, matching the text and the history by checksum. Zero disagreed. The file that was loaded was then checked row by row against that same record, and counted again from the file itself.
We drew 492 entries at random under a plan written and frozen before the test, and read all nine checks it named. All nine passed. Every one of the 492 matched the page it came from exactly.
We fetched the state’s own certified PDFs for 150 chapters and compared 238 entries against them. Zero disagreed.
150 entries were read by a person against the state’s page, one at a time. None was wrong. At that sample size the true error rate could still be as high as 2.5%.
For the 45 numbers the state prints twice, we checked that each copy matched a different place in the PDF rather than both matching the same one. All 44 pairs tested were distinct. A clean sweep needs the same scrutiny as a dirty one.

What it can't tell you

Whether a rule is current or in force today. Nothing here says so, and the date on a chapter is an update date, not a currency statement.
Whether this web text matches the certified PDF that is the official Code. We checked 238 entries and found no difference — but the same check over 7,916 entries it was not grading found 300 that did differ, nearly all of them rules laid out as tables. Zero never meant they agree everywhere.
Which copy is in force when the state prints the same number twice. We return both and never choose.
Whether a rule has been challenged, upheld or struck down. Nothing here carries any such signal.

Known gaps

Twelve chapter pages are not here at all: 8 chapters in title 365 whose pages answered with the wrong chapter, 237-990 (whose page holds about 269,000 characters of geographic names in no section), 332-26 and 296-134 (which yields only its 8 disposition rows).
One entry in a chapter’s section table, 246-366-160, has no rule on the page and is not carried.
The certification date is known for only 300 of the 2,856 chapters — the ones whose PDF we actually fetched. It is empty everywhere else because it was never read there, never guessed.
Rules laid out as tables are the one class where this copy and the official PDF were measured to differ. 289 of the 300 differences found outside the graded sample were table layout. Those entries carry a line saying so.
319 entries have an image on the state’s page — a form, a map, a diagram. Images are not copied, so anything the rule says in a picture is missing here.
Where the state prints a reviser’s note at the end of a rule, it is stored in the history field. That is editorial matter in a field labelled history.
The site publishes no robots file; we re-checked for one before every run and took one page every two seconds under a name that identifies GLO.

Notes you may see on an entry

21,873 disposition table rows: “THIS IS NOT A RULE. It is the state’s own record that this number was repealed, decodified or moved. There is no rule text behind it.”
90 entries (45 numbers): “The state prints this section twice, one copy effective until a date and one effective from it. Both are here. We do not tell you which is in force today.”
19 entries: “THIS RULE HAS NOT TAKEN EFFECT. The state prints it once, labelled effective on a future date, with no current version alongside it.”
463 sections: “The state prints no text for this section. Only its number and heading are here.”
4,496 entries: “This rule is laid out as a table, the one class where this copy and the state’s certified PDF were measured to differ. Read it against the official PDF.”
319 entries: “The state’s page carries an image here. Images are not copied, so anything the rule says in a picture is missing.”
114 entries: “The state marks this material as not adopted under the Administrative Procedure Act. That is the state’s own label.”
37 entries, all in title 222: “The state marks this section with an asterisk and explains the mark at the head of the chapter. The mark is shown as printed.”
27 entries: “The heading on the section and the heading in the chapter’s own section table are not the same words. Both are shown.”
A lookup of RCW: “That is Washington statute law, not the Administrative Code. The lookup says so rather than returning nothing — every rule’s history block cites RCW.”
A lookup of a chapter number: ““WAC 246-945” is a chapter, not a section. The lookup says so rather than returning nothing.”

Nothing here is legal advice or a judgment that a rule is in force. Full counts for software: the defect_floor field on every Washington result (source=wa).