Council Insights
Explore Philadelphia City Council legislative activity.
What Council turns into law
Bills signed into law between 2000 and 2023, counted by subject. Council produced 6,103 laws in that window and the overwhelming majority of them are about the physical city: what gets built, where, and how people move around it. The share in brackets is how often bills on that subject became law.
Counted rather than ranked by pass rate on purpose. A subject's pass rate is almost exactly 100 minus its rate of dying unvoted, so ranking by it would just redraw What dies backwards. Volume is the part that is not already on screen.
Selecting a category opens the full list of bills on that subject that became law, which returns a higher number than the bar: the bars stop at 2023 so that the pass rates beside them compare like with like, and the list does not stop at all.
By category
| Category | Signed into law | Bills | Share signed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoning | 3310 | 4103 | 80.7% |
| Transportation | 2200 | 2619 | 84% |
| Budget | 1391 | 1993 | 69.8% |
| Business | 1192 | 1583 | 75.3% |
| Government | 921 | 1318 | 69.9% |
| Community | 511 | 611 | 83.6% |
| Public safety | 445 | 645 | 69% |
| Health | 284 | 410 | 69.3% |
| Environment | 265 | 351 | 75.5% |
| Education | 181 | 273 | 66.3% |
By tag, the fifteen largest
Tags on at least 60 bills. A bill carries several, so these overlap.
| Tag | Signed into law | Bills | Share signed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoning | 1888 | 2286 | 82.6% |
| Planning | 1536 | 1792 | 85.7% |
| Infrastructure | 1262 | 1427 | 88.4% |
| Transportation | 909 | 1084 | 83.9% |
| Land use | 862 | 1017 | 84.8% |
| Housing | 840 | 1147 | 73.2% |
| Finance | 824 | 1096 | 75.2% |
| Business | 764 | 1026 | 74.5% |
| Parking | 732 | 911 | 80.4% |
| Government | 686 | 981 | 69.9% |
| Traffic | 486 | 601 | 80.9% |
| Neighborhood | 467 | 548 | 85.2% |
| Public safety | 435 | 632 | 68.8% |
| Economic development | 359 | 479 | 74.9% |
| Taxation | 344 | 627 | 54.9% |
Top Issues · 2026
Click a tag to see its full history. The selection follows you to Activity, where it filters the status chart.
Impact Distribution
Is Council producing substantive policy or mostly ceremonial items? Click a segment to browse those bills.