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.
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 presentgit diff— see exactly what text changed between any two points in timegit blame— trace when a specific provision was added- Tags — jump to a specific Congress or year
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.
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) |
# 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 -1All 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.
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
- 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
See ROADMAP.md for planned features including:
- Web interface with cross-reference graph
- Bills as pull requests
- Roll call vote records
- Full-text search
- 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
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.
Built by nickvido and v1d0b0t.
Read the story: Every Law a Commit