SOUTH SOUND CHAMBER OF COMMERCE LEGISLATIVE COALITION 2026 LEGISLATIVE REPORT – February 13, 2026

The Washington State Legislature is engaged in floor action this week.  This means there has been no committee action and instead they are working on moving bills out of the House of Origin before the February 17, 5 p.m. deadline.   Once they are done with this, they will start up policy committee hearings to meet the next cut off date for bills to be out of opposite house policy committees which is February 25.  March 2nd is when bills have to be out of the opposite house fiscal committees and bills have to be passed off the oppositive house floor by March 6.  They will then have until Sine Die on March 12th to reconcile amendments and get bills to the Governor.  As you can see this will be very fast paced and in the meantime a lot of bills will not make it past these cut off dates.

And now we will start seeing real budget and tax action.  We expect to see the budget released in the Senate by the end of next week.  At that point you will start to see budgets and associated bills that are ‘necessary to implement the budget” (NTIB)move through committees and through the respective houses.  This will include the income tax proposal, the Medicaid reimbursement tax for employers, and all other bills “fixing” taxes from last year – depending on how much money they need after crafting the budgets.  Once the budgets have moved through both houses and been amendment accordingly, they will go into conference committee to craft the final budget.

I’ve highlighted key bills for the business community below.  You can see the full list of bills that have died (but some may come back to life if they are NTIB).  Most of these have not passed out of the House of Origin yet.