Important 2025 Legislature dates

To become a law, bills must pass through committee hearings and earn chamber approval in the House and Senate before the session ends.

The legislative calendar is a series of gates. As each deadline date slams closed, some bills are left outside. Those bills can go no farther and generally are referred to as "dead."

There are arcane legislative ways to reanimate such bills, but they are rarely used. Bills can also be moved to side pens for farther consideration. Both chambers' rules and revenue committees and any joint committees are not subject to committee deadlines.

In general, though, these deadline gates will winnow hundreds of education bills down to a few dozen.

OSBA legislative advocates are your shepherds. They are trying to get the good bills through the gates and head off the bad bills or at least clean them up a little before they go through. (Although it might be better to imagine herding cats than more docile sheep.)

Here are the dates circled on the legislative calendar.

Jan. 21 - The 2025 legislative session opens, and committee hearings begin. The session can last no more than 160 days.

Feb. 25 - Measure introduction deadline: Legislators must file any bills they requested by the Jan. 17 starting deadline. They can still request up to five bills, but by this point, advocates know most of what they will be dealing with.

Feb. 16 - The quarterly Oregon Economic and Revenue Forecast is presented to the House and Senate revenue committees. Typically, this report helps legislators finalize their budget plans for this session.

March 21 - First chamber work session posting deadline: A bill must have been placed on a committee agenda by this day, or it will be among the first to die.

April 9 - First chamber work session deadline: Bills that have not had a committee vote in their chamber of origin or been moved into a committee exempt from the deadlines by this day are effectively dead.

May 9 - Second chamber work session posting deadline: House bills in the Senate and Senate bills in the House must be placed on a committee agenda by this day or their 2025 gate is closed.

May 14 - This day's quarterly Oregon Economic and Revenue Forecast is the final forecast before the session ends, finalizing numbers in the budget.

May 23 - Second chamber work session deadline: There are not many bills left by this point, when a bill will need to have passed its chamber of origin as well as a committee in the opposite chamber to keep going.

June 18 - Legislators say they are going to try to end the session by this day.

June 29 - Sine die is Latin for "without a day." It means that any bills that haven't passed both chambers have no days left because the Legislature is constitutionally required to close down.