How to Find and Cite Nevada Law

A Nevada agency can't adopt its own regulation until a lawyer for the Legislature has handed the text back. That is NRS 233B.064, and it covers every permanent regulation in the state.

The wording leaves no wiggle room. An agency shall not adopt, amend or repeal a permanent regulation until it has received from the Legislative Counsel the approved or revised text of the regulation in the form to be adopted. The agency also pays for the rewrite. Under NRS 233B.0635 it reimburses the Legislative Counsel Bureau at an hourly rate for the time its Legal Division spends examining and revising the draft.

The rest of the sequence runs the same way. Once the approved text comes back, NRS 233B.060 lets the agency give notice and hold its hearing. After adoption, NRS 233B.067 sends the regulation to the Legislative Commission or its Subcommittee to Review Regulations, which approves it or objects. If it clears, the Legislative Counsel files the original with the Secretary of State, and NRS 233B.070 makes that filing the moment the rule takes effect.

So a Nevada agency writes a first draft, runs the hearing and votes. It does not write the final words and it does not file them.

The same office writes the statute book

That reach does not stop at regulations. NRS 220.120 hands the Nevada Revised Statutes to the Legislative Counsel too, numbering, arrangement and all.

The powers in that section go further than you would expect. The Counsel may not alter the sense, meaning or effect of a legislative act. Inside that limit the Counsel may renumber sections, rearrange them, rewrite headnotes, swap figures for written words and back, make capitalization uniform, correct wrong references to officers and departments, and fix clerical errors. Subsection 6 goes further again, letting the Counsel add, revise, move or remove nonsubstantive definitions to improve readability or cut repetitive phrasing.

Which means the NRS is not the enrolled bill word for word, and Nevada says so out loud. NRS 220.170 (3) makes the NRS the official codified version of the Statutes of Nevada and prima facie evidence of the law in every court in the state. Then it adds that the evidence can be rebutted by proof the code differs from the official Statutes of Nevada, except where the difference is one NRS 220.120 allowed. Read that twice. An authorized difference cannot be used to knock the code down.

Old numbers that keep working

NRS 220.120 (7) is the subsection to keep in your head. If the Legislative Counsel renumbers a section, a citation to the old number is "deemed to have the same meaning and legal effect as if the citation were to the new number," however long ago the renumbering happened, and whatever revisions the section picked up afterwards, unless some other intent is specified.

A statute that forgives your stale citation. It cuts both ways. An old NRS number sitting in a ten year old contract still points at wherever the provision went, and at everything that happened to it after it arrived.

How Nevada says to cite it

Nevada wrote its citation form into the statute book. NRS 220.170 (4) lays it out.

Nevada Revised Statutes   NRS
A title                   title 00 of NRS
A chapter                 chapter 000 of NRS
A section                 NRS 000.000

So NRS 233B.064. No section symbol. No "Nev. Rev. Stat." You will meet Nev. Rev. Stat. § 78.015 in out of state briefs and in research guides, and that is not the form the statute names.

Regulations take the same shape. The Nevada Supreme Court Law Library's citation guide gives NAC 213.040 for a current section, and asks for a year in parentheses only when you are citing a superseded one.

The numbering is decimal all the way down. Digits before the point are the chapter, digits after are the section, and the Legislature's own research library spells out what falls out of that: NRS 233B.0395 lies between NRS 233B.039 and NRS 233B.040.

Reading one section properly

Open NAC 213.110 and the heading runs "Commutation of sentence of life without possibility of parole. (NRS 213.085, 233B.040, 233B.050)". That parenthetical is not decoration. NRS 233B.065 (2) (b) makes the Legislative Counsel print, for every section of a permanent regulation, the citation of authority the agency adopted it under. You know which statutes to read next before you have read the rule.

The history line does the other half. Sections in that chapter carry notes like "(Added to NAC by Bd. of Pardons Comm'rs by R085-09, eff. 8-13-2010)". R085-09 is the regulation's file number, which is how you pull the rulemaking record out of the Nevada Register.

There is a third thing the same subsection requires. NRS 233B.065 (2) (a) makes the Counsel include the date an agency last finished the review that NRS 233B.050 (1) (e) demands, which is at least once every ten years, with a report to the next session of the Legislature. Ten years is a long time for a rule to go unexamined. If that date on a chapter is old, read the chapter as old.

The counts

Our Nevada set holds 82,538 sections, 49,745 of them statutes and 30,978 regulations.

The statute split is 49,173 in force, 311 repealed, 192 renumbered and 69 expired. Given what NRS 220.120 (7) says, that renumbered group is worth a second look. Those are live provisions whose old addresses still resolve to them.

Regulations come out at 30,956 in force, with 22 sections marked not yet effective.

Attorney general opinions are their own animal. The office publishes formal opinions so they can be cited for persuasive weight, and the modern output is thin. Its own published list shows three for 2026 so far, four for 2025 and four for 2024, sitting in front of an archive that goes back to 1914. The archive is arranged by year rather than by subject, so if you know roughly when your question was live, browsing beats searching.

One last thing if you are writing code

Treat what follows the point as a decimal fraction, not as a section count. Read 233B.0395 as three hundred and ninety five and you will file it after 233B.040. Nevada files it before.

Facts used

All Nevada corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data, measured 2026-09-18.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.