1,262 Bills on Day One: Texas Prefiling Opens at the Second-Busiest Pace on Record — and Richardson's Rep Files a $15 Minimum Wage
More than 1,000 measures landed by noon Monday: 972 in the House, 290 in the Senate. Inside the pile are 13 Medicaid-expansion measures, a pair of bills repealing the sheriff 287(g) mandate — and a proposal by a Dallas County lawmaker to more than double the state minimum wage to $15.
AUSTIN — By the end of opening day, lawmakers had filed 1,262 bills and resolutions for the 90th Texas Legislature — 972 in the House and 290 in the Senate, with more than 1,000 of them in by roughly noon — according to Texas Policy Research's review of the filings, read in full by this desk. Roughly 1,175 were bills and nearly 60 were joint resolutions proposing constitutional amendments. That makes Monday the second-busiest opening day of prefiling on record: only the 89th Legislature's November 2024 opening was busier, at 1,511, per the Legislative Reference Library; the 88th Legislature's 2022 opening produced about 920, and the 87th's in 2020 just 541. A handful of offices drove the volume — Sugar Land's Rep. Suleman Lalani filed about 70 measures, Austin's Rep. John Bucy III about 60, and Midlothian's Rep. Brian Harrison, a Metroplex member, about 45; in the Senate, Laredo's Sen. Judith Zaffirini filed nearly 70 and San Antonio's Sen. José Menéndez more than 50.
Three subjects in the pile have not yet had their own Dallas file. Thirteen opening-day measures would expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, led by Bucy's House Bill 101 — coverage for Texans eligible for federal matching funds, effective Jan. 1, 2028, and contingent on voters approving his House Joint Resolution 21 — with Zaffirini's Senate Bill 31 and Senate Joint Resolution 6 in the Senate. On immigration, San Antonio Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer's House Bill 123 and Menéndez's Senate Bill 99 would repeal the 2025 law (Senate Bill 8) requiring sheriffs in counties of at least 100,000 people — Dallas and Tarrant included — to request participation in the federal 287(g) program. And House Bill 110, by Richardson Rep. Ana-Maria Rodriguez Ramos, a Dallas County author, would raise the Texas minimum wage to $15 an hour from Sept. 1, 2027; Texas currently follows the federal $7.25 floor, unchanged since 2009. By caption count, about 50 opening-day measures touch property taxes, roughly 30 firearms, and about 20 data centers.
Volume is a signal, not a forecast. In the 89th session, lawmakers filed more than 8,700 bills and only just under 1,200 passed both chambers — roughly one in seven. Filing continues until March 12, 2027, and the Legislature convenes Jan. 12 under a split arrangement with no modern precedent: Democrats hold the governorship, the lieutenant governorship and the House, while Republicans keep the Senate. Which of Monday's 1,262 survive that arithmetic is the session's real story — tonight, the honest headline is the pile itself, and how fast it is growing.
