State leaderboards
Regulation Rankings
States and categories ranked from the records PlainRegWatch tracks across privacy, AI, employment, food safety and right to repair.
- Most regulated
- California
- Top tracker score
- 100/100
- Leaderboards
- 6
According to this portal's Publishing Organization, this page was last reviewed in August 2026 against our methodology. Figures and extracts on this site, including tables above 1,000 rows when the corpus is that large, are the publisher's responsibility.
The verdict
California has the most tracked regulations and the highest tracker score (100/100) in this dataset, while Employment & Worker Protection has the most tracked enacted records nationwide, and Texas covers the broadest span of tracked categories. Texas is the #10 cutoff to make this top-10 most-regulated list at 5 tracked regulations.
- California
- most tracked records & highest tracker score
- 107
- employment & worker protection laws (top category)
- 5/5
- categories covered by Texas
- 5
- #10 most-regulated cutoff
Every leaderboard is rendered server-side from the live PlainRegWatch database, figures update as new state legislative records are tracked.
Most Regulated States
States with the highest number of new state-level regulations across all categories.
State regulatory activity, Top 10
Total state-level regulations tracked across all five policy categories
Highest Tracker Scores
States with the highest PlainRegWatch tracker scores across the five covered categories.
| # | State | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 100 |
| 2 | Colorado | 76 |
| 3 | Texas | 69 |
| 4 | Connecticut | 62 |
| 5 | Illinois | 62 |
Most Enacted Regulations
States that have enacted the most regulations into law.
| # | State | Enacted |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 12 |
| 2 | Colorado | 8 |
| 3 | Illinois | 8 |
| 4 | Oregon | 8 |
| 5 | New York | 7 |
Least Regulated States
States with the fewest new state-level regulations.
Most Regulated Categories
Regulatory categories with the most enacted laws nationwide.
| # | Category | Laws |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Employment & Worker Protection | 107 |
| 2 | Data Privacy | 21 |
| 3 | AI Regulation | 10 |
| 4 | Right to Repair | 10 |
| 5 | Food Chemical Bans | 8 |
How these rankings are computed
- Most / Least Regulated States: total state-level regulations PlainRegWatch tracks for each state across all five policy categories.
- Highest Tracker Scores: a 0–100 portal-derived composite of records marked enacted across this site's five covered categories.
- Most Regulated Categories: the count of state laws tracked within each policy area nationwide.
- Most Regulatory Diversity: how many of the five policy categories a state regulates at least once.
Read the full methodology → Every figure is rendered server-side from the live database; nothing is hardcoded.
Key takeaways
California sets the regulatory pace, but the action is concentrated in worker-protection and privacy law.
- California has the most tracked regulations and a 100/100 tracker score in this dataset. View California
- Employment & Worker Protection is the most-regulated policy area, with 107 state laws, far more than any other category. Explore category
- Texas regulates across all 5 policy categories, the broadest coverage of any state. View Texas
Rankings reflect regulations currently tracked from official state legislative records; coverage expands as new laws are enacted.
Download the regulation-level extract used for these rankings: state-regulation-landscape.csv. National reference on statistics.
Every figure on PlainRegWatch is rendered from curated state legislative and Federal Register source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Leaderboards rank the same state and category totals shown on each profile page. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of July 2026. Tracker scores and rule counts are curated records in five tracked categories - not enforcement strength, legal advice, a complete inventory of US law, or a live bill-status feed.