The number a tracker chooses to lead with is a methodology decision
A full-text legislative search for "earned wage access" and its synonyms returns every bill where that phrase, or a related one, shows up anywhere in the text — including the fine print of an unrelated bill, a committee note, or a definitions section borrowed from somewhere else. That search, run against our own holdings, currently returns 171 bills across 39 states.
Reporting that 171 as "171 EWA bills" would be the easy, confident-sounding version of this number. It would also be wrong for 49 of them.
What CONFIRMED and NEEDS_REVIEW actually mean
Every bill in our system carries a classification. CONFIRMED means a bill's substance — not just a keyword hit — is about earned wage access: licensing, fee caps, disclosure rules, or a definitional carve-out written for EWA specifically. NEEDS_REVIEW means the match came from language that is ambiguous on its face and needs a human (or further evidence) to decide whether the bill belongs in an EWA tracker at all.
As of today, 122 of the 171 bills are CONFIRMED, spread across 37 states. The remaining 49 are NEEDS_REVIEW, spread across 15 states — two of which, Alabama and California, have no CONFIRMED EWA bill in our holdings at all. Every one of their matches is still pending review. A tracker that counted Alabama and California toward "39 states regulating EWA" would be counting states where we cannot yet confirm a single bill is actually about EWA.
What the ambiguous bills actually turned out to be
The clearest illustration is not hypothetical. Our holdings mark a bill as "enacted" the moment a legislature's own record shows it signed into law — before anyone checks whether the bill is really about earned wage access. Five of the enacted bills in our system are classified NEEDS_REVIEW, and reading what they say shows why: Nevada SB 44 (83rd session) is titled "Revises provisions relating to financial services" — too broad on its face to confirm as an EWA bill without reading the full text. Missouri SB 103 (2023) is "Modifies provisions relating to judicial proceedings." Oregon HB 2930 (2025) is "Relating to conflict of interest requirements." Texas HB 14 (2025) is about the state's nuclear energy industry. And Utah H.B. 240 (2017) is "Employability to Careers Program" — a workforce bill, not a financial-services one.
None of those five are bills we would want sitting in a list titled "earned wage access laws." If our tracker reported "23 enacted EWA bills" — the raw count of everything our search flagged as both a match and signed into law — it would be wrong by five, and wrong in a way that would hand a compliance reader a nuclear-energy statute and an employability program as if they were wage-advance law.
The number we publish, and the number we withhold
So the number we stand behind is 122 CONFIRMED bills across 37 states, not 171 across 39. And when we report what has actually become law, the count is 12 CONFIRMED bills, enacted, across 9 states — not the 23 that a naive "matched and signed" query would hand you.
This is also why we do not round up. A tracker's credibility is not the size of the number it reports. It is whether every item in that number survives you clicking through to read it yourself.
What this means for you
If you are deciding whether your product needs a license in a given state, the distinction between CONFIRMED and NEEDS_REVIEW is the distinction between "we are confident this bill regulates EWA" and "we are not yet sure, don't act on this alone." We keep the NEEDS_REVIEW bills visible rather than deleting them, because a bill that turns out to matter after a second look is more dangerous to have hidden than to have mislabeled "pending."