How to Find Federal Regulations

Two publications matter. The Federal Register is the daily government gazette: every proposed rule, final rule, notice, and presidential document appears there first, in chronological order, with a preamble explaining what the agency did and why. The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is the codification: the operative text of final rules, rearranged by subject into 50 titles, with the preambles stripped out.

Think of the relationship as identical to the one between the Statutes at Large and the U.S. Code. The Federal Register is the session-law equivalent; the CFR is the code equivalent. When you need to know what the law requires today, read the CFR. When you need to know why it requires that, or what the agency said about a term it never defined, read the Federal Register preamble.

The CFR's 50 titles roughly track agencies: Title 12 (Banks and Banking), Title 17 (Commodity and Securities Exchanges), Title 21 (Food and Drugs), Title 26 (Internal Revenue), Title 29 (Labor), Title 40 (Protection of Environment), Title 42 (Public Health), Title 45 (Public Welfare). Titles divide into chapters (by agency), then parts, then sections. A citation like 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1200 means Title 29, part 1910, section .1200.

Start with the statute's implementing authority, because agencies must cite it. The fastest free tool is the Parallel Table of Authorities and Rules, published in the CFR Index and Finding Aids volume and available on govinfo. It lists U.S. Code sections and public laws and tells you which CFR parts cite them as authority. Look up 42 U.S.C. § 7411 and you will be pointed to the relevant EPA parts in Title 40.

On Westlaw or Lexis, pull up the statute and check the Notes of Decisions and the accompanying references; both services link statutes to implementing regulations. In the CFR itself, every part opens with an 'Authority' note citing the enabling statute, and often a 'Source' note giving the Federal Register citation of the rule that created the part. Reading those two notes tells you where the part came from and whether the agency had power to issue it.

If you know the agency but not the citation, go to the agency's own website. Most agencies maintain a regulations page that links directly to their CFR chapter and to recent rulemakings, and agency staff often post plain-language compliance guides that name the governing sections.

Full-text searching works, but search the CFR the way you would search a statute: use terms of art the agency would use, not lay synonyms, and restrict by title once you know which one applies.

The print and PDF CFR is revised only once a year, on a staggered schedule: Titles 1–16 as of January 1, Titles 17–27 as of April 1, Titles 28–41 as of July 1, and Titles 42–50 as of October 1. A govinfo CFR PDF can therefore be up to twelve months stale. Always check the currency date on the page you are reading.

The eCFR solves most of this. It is updated within a few business days of each Federal Register issue and displays the date through which it is current at the top of the page, plus the amendment history for each section. Note that the eCFR is an editorial compilation and is not the official legal edition of the CFR; for a filing, cite the official CFR and confirm the text matches.

To update an official CFR volume by hand, use the List of CFR Sections Affected (LSA), a monthly cumulative pamphlet on govinfo that tells you which sections were amended since the last annual revision and gives the Federal Register page. Then close the remaining gap with the 'CFR Parts Affected' tables published in each daily Federal Register issue and cumulated for the current month.

Watch effective dates. A rule published today may not take effect for 30, 60, or 180 days, and compliance dates can be later still. The Federal Register document's DATES section controls, and delayed-effect provisions may not yet appear in the eCFR text.

Take the Federal Register citation from the CFR section's source note and pull the document on govinfo or federalregister.gov. The preamble to a final rule summarizes the proposal, responds to significant comments, and explains the agency's reasoning — that response-to-comments discussion is often the only authoritative interpretation of ambiguous regulatory language, and it is what courts examine under arbitrary-and-capricious review.

For the full administrative record, use regulations.gov. Search by docket number or by the RIN (Regulation Identifier Number) that appears at the top of every Federal Register rulemaking document. The docket holds the proposed rule, public comments, regulatory impact analyses, technical studies, and sometimes ex parte communications.

For rules still in progress, use reginfo.gov. It hosts the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, which lists planned rulemakings by RIN with projected dates, and it tracks which rules are currently under OIRA review, including how long they have been pending.

For a codified regulation, cite title, C.F.R., section, and the year of the CFR edition you used: 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1200 (2023). Rule 14.2 governs. Give the name of the regulation only if the section is commonly known by it; otherwise the numerical citation is enough. If you are citing the current text from the eCFR, cite the most recent official CFR edition whose text matches, or add a parenthetical noting the eCFR and the date you accessed it.

For a rule not yet codified, cite the Federal Register: Rule Name, 88 Fed. Reg. 12,345 (Mar. 1, 2023) (to be codified at 40 C.F.R. pt. 60). Insert commas in Federal Register page numbers of five digits or more. For a proposed rule, use: Rule Name, 88 Fed. Reg. 12,345 (proposed Mar. 1, 2023) (to be codified at 40 C.F.R. pt. 60). Pinpoint to the actual page, not the first page of the document, when quoting a preamble.

In court filings governed by local rules, check whether the court prefers a different form; many federal district courts simply accept the Bluebook form. ALWD Guide forms for the CFR and Federal Register are substantively the same.

Run the citation through KeyCite or Shepard's. Both flag whether the section has been amended, removed, or reserved, and — critically — whether a court has held it invalid, vacated it, stayed it, or enjoined its enforcement nationwide. A regulation can sit unchanged in the eCFR while a district court has vacated it; only citator research catches that.

Also check for congressional disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, which lets Congress nullify a recently submitted rule by joint resolution, and for agency stays or delayed effective dates announced in later Federal Register notices. Search the Federal Register for the CFR part number to see everything the agency has done to it recently.

Finally, remember that finding a regulation is not the end of the analysis. After Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), courts no longer defer to an agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute under Chevron; they exercise independent judgment on the statute's meaning. A properly promulgated legislative rule still binds, but the argument that it exceeds statutory authority is now more live than it was, so read the enabling statute yourself. Deference to an agency's reading of its own genuinely ambiguous regulation survives, but only within the narrowed limits set by Kisor v. Wilkie (2019).

Much of what agencies do is guidance: interpretive rules, policy statements, manuals, advisory opinions, no-action letters, FAQs, and enforcement memoranda. These are exempt from notice-and-comment under 5 U.S.C. § 553(b) and generally do not appear in the CFR. They are not binding law, but they tell you how the agency will actually behave, which is often what a client needs to know.

Find them on the agency's website, in agency-specific databases on Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law (which have strong collections for the IRS, SEC, FDA, DOL, and EPA), and sometimes in the Federal Register's Notices section. Some agencies maintain guidance-document portals. When you cite guidance, identify the issuing office, the document's title and number, and its date, and say plainly in your analysis that it is nonbinding.

Adjudicatory decisions by agency tribunals — the NLRB, BIA, Tax Court, PTAB, and others — are a separate body of administrative law with their own reporters and databases. Do not assume the CFR contains the agency's interpretation; often the decisions do.