Federal Register Volumes Now Available Online

Where can you get back issues of the Federal Register online? The Law Library of Congress has now completed the collection of historical volumes of the Federal Register available online.

The Law Library acquired this collection from William S. Hein & Co., Inc. to make all volumes of the Federal Register available in open access to researchers.  The collection starts with the first Federal Register in 1936 and contains all volumes through 1993. For more recent volumes, see federalregister.gov and FDSys (volumes 1994-2015). The Law Library website for the collection is //www.loc.gov/collections/federal-register/.

The Federal Register is published every business day and contains executive orders and proclamations as well as federal agency public notices, proposed rules, and regulations. The final rules are codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which is published annually.

At this time, we are offering the volumes in their full daily form. This is 14,586 issues from March 14, 1936 (or 1 Fed. Reg. 1) to Dec. 30, 1993 (or 58 Fed. Reg. 69169). It is helpful to know the exact date or issue of the rule you are researching, which can be found in the citation. To put the issues in chronological order, select “Date” under the “Sort by” pulldown and press “go.” On the left-hand side are facets that can narrow results by year or Federal Register volume.

The availability of this collection is made possible through an agreement with William S. Hein & Co., Inc. The agreement precludes bulk downloading and commercial reuse.  We have also acquired a few other collections, so stay tuned for more information as they become available!

Please note: The link http://loc.heinonline.org/loc/ has been retired.  The collections previously accessible through this link will be available on Law.gov. Please check our digital projects webpage for the current status and for new links when they become available.