How to . . .   find the U.S. Code The U.S. Code is prepared by the Office of Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives, and published by the Government Printing Office. The Code is published every six years. To bring the Code up to date, you must use annual supplements. However, there are versions of the Code issued by commercial publishers that are more current than the official Code and its supplements. These publications are called U.S. Code Annotated and U.S. Code Service. You can read the full text of the official U.S. Code on the Web. The U.S. Code, Code Annotated, and U.S. Code Service may be available from a library.

Web Access

GPO Access provides the full text of the official version of the U.S. Code. You can do fielded searches to look for Code material by popular name of the law, the public law number, U.S. Code citation, Statutes at Large citation, or word or phrase. You can also browse the U.S. Code by individual Code titles, down to the section level, for the latest available update.

The U.S. House Office of the Law Revision Counsel also provides the full text of the official version of the U.S. Code. You can do fielded searches or download entire titles and/or chapters. This site also provides classification tables that show where recently enacted laws will appear in the United States Code and which sections of the Code have been amended by those laws.

Libraries

The U.S. Code, U.S. Code Annotated, or U.S. Code Service are generally available in federal depository libraries. The federal depository library program is made up of over 1,300 libraries that collect government documents and make them available to the public for borrowing or reading. A list of depository libraries is available on GPO's Web site.  Most depository libraries are within a university or state library, so sometimes borrowing privileges are restricted.

Larger public libraries may also collect the U.S. Code, Code Annotated, or Code Service. You can find your public library by looking it up in the phone book; libraries are often listed in the local government section of the blue pages or they may be listed in the yellow pages under "libraries." Or you can look at a list of libraries that have Web sites or a list of state libraries.