How to Find and Cite Pennsylvania Law

Pennsylvania began consolidating its statutes in 1970 and still hasn't finished. So the statute book stays small while the rule book keeps filling up: 14,617 statute sections against 50,326 sections of regulation.

That gap is what a half-done job looks like from the outside. It also decides how you cite almost everything in the state.

Two shelves, and only one of them is a code

The General Assembly kicked off a consolidation program with the act of November 25, 1970 (P.L. 707, No. 230). The plan was to take statutes that had piled up in the order they were passed and refile them by subject, into numbered titles. The Legislative Reference Bureau publishes the result as the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, 79 titles of it.

The program never ended. Anything not yet consolidated stays where it started, as an act of the General Assembly, printed first as a slip law and then bound by session into the Laws of Pennsylvania, which nearly everyone calls the Pamphlet Laws. There is no single official volume holding all current Pennsylvania statutes.

So you work with two arrangements. One reads like a code. The other reads like a stack of acts in date order, and most people find their way around it using a commercially produced topical arrangement, abbreviated P.S. The Commonwealth Court has said flatly that this compilation has not, by law or by practice, become the official version. See In re Appeal of Tenet HealthSystems Bucks Cnty., LLC, 880 A.2d 721, 725-26 (Pa. Cmwlth. 2005), appeal denied, 897 A.2d 1185 (Pa. 2006). For unconsolidated law, the act is the law.

One letter decides which book you are in

The consolidated form is set by 1 Pa.C.S. § 102, which is itself the section saying so. Title, then section. That short form has only been Pa.C.S. since Act 271 of 1974 changed it from Pa.S.

For unconsolidated law, the note to Pa.R.A.P. 126 gives working formats. Cite the act by date and Pamphlet Laws number, with a parallel P.S. cite where one exists: Act of February 14, 2008, P.L. 6, 65 P.S. §§ 67.101-67.3104. Or pull out a single section: Section 3(a) of the Act of May 16, 1923, P.L. 207, as amended, 53 P.S. § 7106(a). The same note tells parties the P.S. set is not official.

Now look at the title numbers the rule picked for its own examples. 65 and 53. Both of those numbers exist on the other shelf too. 65 Pa.C.S. is Public Officers, home of the Sunshine Act and the ethics chapter. 65 P.S. § 67.101 is the short title of the Right-to-Know Law, which is not in Title 65 of the Consolidated Statutes at all. Title 53 splits the same way, Municipalities Generally on one side and Municipal and Quasi-Municipal Corporations on the other.

Drop the C out of a cite and you haven't made a typo. You've pointed at different law wearing the same number.

The regulations are the tidy half

Agency rules are the Pennsylvania Code, the official codification created by 45 Pa.C.S. § 701 and run by the same Bureau under the Commonwealth Documents Law, the act of July 31, 1968 (P.L. 769, No. 240). Over 40 titles, numbered to follow the shape of state government rather than the statute titles. Cite by title and section: 28 Pa. Code § 23.10(b).

Changes move through the Pennsylvania Bulletin, which 45 Pa.C.S. § 724 makes the Commonwealth's official gazette and which comes out at least once a week under 1 Pa. Code § 3.14. Cite an issue by volume, page and date: 36 Pa.B. 510 (February 4, 2006). A cumulative index runs quarterly, a loose-leaf reporter folds changes into the Code monthly, and at least once a year everything filed gets permanently integrated under 45 Pa.C.S. § 726.

Court rules live in that same Code. 45 Pa.C.S. § 702 lists general rules and rules of court among the documents that get codified, which is why the appellate rule I quoted above also has a Code address: 210 Pa. Code Rule 126.

What the corpus looks like

These counts come from a US primary law corpus maintained by Vaquill AI, measured on 2026-09-18. Pennsylvania holds 72,249 sections.

• Regulations: 50,326
• Statutes: 14,617
• Court rules: 6,467
• Attorney General opinions: 653
• Constitution: 186

Two of those deserve a second look.

On the regulation side, 36,976 sections are in force and 10,977 are reserved. A reserved section is a number the Code is holding open with nothing inside it. An address, not a rule. Count raw sections to size this body of law and roughly a fifth of your total is empty rooms.

On the court rules side, 2,640 are in force, 277 are rescinded, 240 are reserved and 9 are renumbered. The other 3,301 come through with no status attached at all, which is over half the rules corpus. For those the text alone won't tell you where the rule stands, and the Bulletin order that last touched it will.

Try it on a real cite

Say 65 P.S. § 67.101 lands in your inbox with no context.

1. Read the abbreviation before the digits. P.S. means unconsolidated, so the binding text is an act, not a code section.
2. Trace back to the act. That section belongs to the act of February 14, 2008 (P.L. 6, No. 3), the Right-to-Know Law.
3. Read the act from the Bureau's own collection, then walk forward through later sessions, because amendments amend the act.
4. Ask whether the subject has been consolidated since. If it has, the act you are reading may have been repealed on the way in.

How often does step four actually bite? Often enough that it belongs in the routine.

What catches people

The County Code, the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L. 323, No. 130), was repealed by the act of May 8, 2024 (P.L. 50, No. 14), and counties now sit in Title 16 of the Consolidated Statutes. The Borough Code went the same way in 2014, into Title 8. Consolidation is still happening, one act at a time.

Two smaller traps. A Pamphlet Laws citation can carry a year that isn't the year of enactment, because a statute finally enacted in January may appear in the prior year's volume, which is why you see forms like act of January 26, 1972 (1971 P. L. 761, No. 188). And the drafting rules for state agencies require every regulation to print the statutory authority it was issued under, so on the regulation side you can read the link back to the statute instead of guessing at it.

If you inherited a Pennsylvania cite from a memo more than a few years old, check whether its subject has changed shelves since. Counties moved in 2024.

Facts used

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.