What does the Philippine Congress actually pass?

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Map of local laws

Search for a town to see the laws that name it, or choose a type of law to see where those laws went. If a province has been split since a law was passed, the law is divided among the provinces that exist today.

Waves

How the kinds of local law have changed

Some kinds of local law are common in one Congress and rare in the next. These shifts usually follow a change in the rules about who can decide something, or about what the national budget will pay for.

Congress used to create and rename barrios itself. It mostly stopped after the Barrio Charter of 1959 gave that power to provincial boards. Laws about state universities and colleges went from 4 in the 16th Congress to 44 in the 17th, which made their tuition free in 2017. Laws making high school annexes independent rose from 2 in the 13th Congress to 151 in the 14th.

Bills

Most bills never become law

BetterGov publishes a record of all 143,156 bills filed in the House of Representatives since 1987. We classified them with the same rules we used for the laws.

In the 8th Congress alone, members filed 35,168 bills. Of these, 86% asked for something in a single place, often a school building or a road. That Congress passed 783 local laws, so no more than 3 in 100 of these bills became law.

Local bills peaked in 1988, when 15,150 were filed. By 1990 the number had dropped. That was the year the national budget began giving each member a lump sum for projects in their district, the Countrywide Development Fund, which later became the PDAF. No year since has had more than 5,266 local bills.

Effort

Where the Senate's time goes

A simple count treats a law that renames a school the same as the national budget. The Senate's records give another measure: how many days each bill spent on the floor. The records begin with the 13th Congress in 2004, and we matched 2,938 of the 2,980 laws passed from then until 2025.

In that period 71% of new laws were local, but they took up 59% of the Senate's floor days and only 23% of its days of debate. National laws were 20% of the total and took up 71% of the days of debate.

Floor days overstate the time spent on local laws. The Senate handles them in batches, and every bill in a batch is credited with the whole day. Of the 2,090 local laws, 964 were presented in one speech covering many bills or approved together in a single motion. On the day a typical local law passed third reading, 23 other future laws passed with it. For a typical national law the number was 4. On January 31, 2022, the Senate passed 151 bills on third reading that later became law.

Some local laws were debated. Senators questioned the sponsors of 226 of them, and the most common kind was a town holiday (40 laws, mostly in two batches in 2007 and 2024), ahead of schools (38). The local law with the most days of debate was RA 9728 (2009), which turned the Bataan Economic Zone in Mariveles into the Freeport Area of Bataan. Next came two laws that redrew House districts. RA 9716 split Camarines Sur's districts and was upheld by the Supreme Court in Aquino III v. COMELEC (2010). RA 9591 gave Malolos City its own district and was struck down in Aldaba v. COMELEC (2010), because the city had fewer than the 250,000 people the Constitution requires.

The president can also certify a bill as urgent. This lets each chamber hold the second and third readings on the same day instead of on separate days. Of the 121 laws certified this way since 2004, 111 were national. The ten local ones all date from 2007 to 2010. Certified laws were 4% of all laws but accounted for 33% of the days of debate.

Promises

Hospitals with fewer beds than their laws allow

When Congress raises a hospital's bed capacity, the law doesn't come with money for the beds. That has to come later through the budget. We compared these laws with PhilHealth's list of accredited hospitals, which shows how many beds each hospital runs.

We found 53 government hospitals whose bed capacity was raised by law since 2016, and 47 of them are accredited for fewer beds than the law sets. Recent laws may not have had time to take effect, but older ones show the same pattern. Of the 44 hospitals with laws passed from 2016 to 2022, 38 are still below the legal number.

Schools named in the laws

We looked up the 1,557 laws from 1987 to 2023 that established, separated or converted a public school. For 85% of them, DepEd's lists include a school with that name in the right town. We couldn't find 5%.

DepEd's lists start in 2017, so for laws passed since 2019 we can check whether the school already existed. Of the 107 we matched, 68% were on DepEd's list before the law was approved. That includes 22 of the 35 laws whose titles say they "establish" a school. In many cases the law gave formal status or a new name to a school that was already running.

Authors

Who writes local laws

Since 2004 the House record has named a principal author for each bill. We traced 2,090 local laws back to their House bills, and matched 1,741 of them to a district representative in OpenHalalan's election data, which gives the province each one represents.

It is often said that political families use local laws to reward their supporters. We tested a simple version of this. We counted a seat as a family seat if someone else with the representative's surname won the governorship, vice governorship, another House seat or a mayoralty in the same province in the same election, or held a House seat there in one of the two previous elections. By that rule, 50% of district terms were family seats.

Representatives in family seats did not author more local laws. They averaged 1.20 per term, compared with 1.30 for everyone else, and the confidence intervals overlap. The difference also changes direction between Congresses: family seats averaged more in two Congresses, about the same in two, and fewer in three.

Calendar

When laws are signed

Before martial law, 84% of laws were approved in June, just after the regular session ended in May. Since 1987 the figure is 10%, and laws are signed throughout the year.

Data

How this was made

Cite this project

@misc{africa2026batas,
  author = {Africa, David Demitri},
  title  = {Batas: what does the Philippine Congress actually pass?},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://github.com/DavidDemitriAfrica/batas}
}

If you use the election data, please also cite OpenHalalan (doi:10.5281/zenodo.17783099).