Written by: Karen Suhaka | April 3, 2022

Some states rely on special sessions to get extra work done, some states don't have special sessions at all. Not surprisingly states with year round sessions don't tend to use special sessions much or at all. Not surprisingly Texas, which meets every other year, has to use special sessions from time to time. More surprisingly Montana does not, and North Dakota barely does. Of course 2021 in Virginia was kind of a mess, with all of their regular session bills technically being passed in a special session. The other states that use special sessions quite a bit may surprise you.

Here's a map showing the count of all regular and special session bills by state, from 2011 to date:

Map

Alaska has no special session bills, and Hawaii has had 31.

And here are the number of bills that passed, regular and special:

Which is quite similar. Hawaii passed 15 of their special session bills.

To interact with this data, and see the full counts for all the states, see this Tableau viz (notice the tabs at the top to explore the data): https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/karen.suhaka/viz/SpecialSessionvsRegularSessionbills/PassedBills