🇺🇸 United States Code as a Git Repository

The entire United States Code — every title, chapter, and section — stored as Markdown in a Git repository. Each commit represents a point-in-time snapshot of federal law, with git diff revealing exactly what changed between enactments.

Why?

Laws change. Understanding what changed and when has historically required navigating dense legal databases or reading legislative summaries written by someone else. Git solves this naturally:

git log — see the history of federal law from 2013 to present
git diff — see exactly what text changed between any two points in time
git blame — trace when a specific provision was added
Tags — jump to a specific Congress or year

What's Here

uscode/
├── title-01-general-provisions/
│   ├── _title.md                    # Title metadata
│   ├── chapter-001-rules-of-construction.md
│   ├── chapter-002-acts-and-resolutions-...md
│   └── ...
├── title-02-the-congress/
├── title-03-the-president/
├── ...
└── title-54-national-park-service-and-related-programs/

53 titles of the United States Code
~2,950 chapter-level Markdown files
~60,400 sections with full statutory text
13 commits spanning 2013–2025 (one per OLRC release point)

Each Markdown file includes YAML frontmatter with metadata (title number, chapter, heading, section count, source URL) and the full statutory text with cross-references, statutory notes, and amendment histories.

Commits & Tags

Every commit corresponds to an Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC) release point — an official snapshot of the US Code as amended through a specific Public Law.

Tag	Public Law	Year	Description
`annual/2013`	113-21	2013	Earliest available OLRC snapshot
`congress/113`	113-296	2014	End of 113th Congress
`annual/2015`	114-38	2015
`congress/114`	114-329	2017	End of 114th Congress
`annual/2017`	115-51	2017
`congress/115`	115-442	2019	End of 115th Congress
`annual/2019`	116-91	2019
`congress/116`	116-344	2021	End of 116th Congress
`annual/2021`	117-81	2021
`annual/2022`	117-262	2022
`congress/117`	117-262	2022	End of 117th Congress
`annual/2024`	118-158	2024
`congress/118`	118-158	2024	End of 118th Congress
`annual/2025`	119-73	2025	Current (latest)

Browsing History

# What changed in federal law between the 115th and 116th Congress?
git diff congress/115..congress/116 --stat

# Full text diff of Title 18 (Crimes) between 2019 and 2025
git diff annual/2019..annual/2025 -- uscode/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-procedure/

# When was a specific section last modified?
git log --oneline -- "uscode/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-procedure/chapter-044-firearms.md"

# How many files changed across the entire 12-year history?
git diff annual/2013..annual/2025 --stat | tail -1

Data Source

All content is derived from the OLRC's official USLM XML release points. The XML is parsed and transformed to Markdown using us-code-tools.

Cross-reference links point to the official OLRC website for the preliminary (prelim) edition.

Markdown Format

Each chapter file follows this structure:

---
title: 18
chapter: '44'
heading: FIREARMS
section_count: 25
source: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title18&num=0&edition=prelim
---

<a id="section-921"></a>

## § 921. Definitions

**(a)** As used in this chapter—

**(1)** The term "person" and the term "whoever" include any individual...

### Statutory Notes

#### Amendments
...

Section headings use ## § with HTML anchor IDs for linking
Subsections use bold labels: **(a)**, **(1)**, **(A)**, **(i)**
Cross-references link to other sections within the repo or to uscode.house.gov
Statutory notes include amendment histories, effective dates, and related materials

Limitations

Coverage starts in 2013 — OLRC XML release points are only available from the 113th Congress onward
Codified law only — this is the consolidated United States Code, not individual bills or public laws in directive format
Not all titles are positive law — some titles are "evidence of law" rather than the legal text itself (see 1 USC § 204)
Appendix titles (5A, 11a, 18a, 28a, 50A) are not yet included
6 sections across titles 5, 10, 25, 28, 38, and 40 have duplicate section numbers in the source XML

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md for planned features including:

Web interface with cross-reference graph
Bills as pull requests
Roll call vote records
Full-text search

Related Projects

timlabs/uscode — US Code as JSON, chapter-level files
divegeek/uscode — US Code with commit-per-title history
unitedstates/uscode — Python tools for downloading and parsing
publicdocs/uscode — Section-level markdown files

License

The United States Code is a work of the US Government and is in the public domain (17 USC § 105).

The tooling used to generate this repository is available under the MIT License.

Credits

Built by nickvido and v1d0b0t.

Read the story: Every Law a Commit