Return to the Guide to the Utah Legislature.
In a typical 45-day General Session, each chamber of the Utah Legislature schedules roughly 100-120 hours of floor debate time. Not all this time actually gets used. I do not tally time spent in committee here, only time spent on the House or Senate floor.
I wrote a program that scrapes bookmarks from archived House and Senate floor videos. These bookmarks allow viewers to jump to discussion of a particular bill. This method means that time "considering" a particular time includes not only time debating that bill, but also time voting on it or addressing other motions relevant to it, such as motions to circle or amend a bill. Recognize that a typical House or Senate floor vote takes about 2 minutes, so deduct that from time "considering" a particular bill if you want an estimate of how long the bill was actually debated.
Even when the Utah House or Utah Senate is on the floor, legislators are often engage in activities other than consideration of bills: Waiting for legislators to sit and come to order (the biggest single use of non-bill time), recesses/saunters (i.e. breaks), recognizing visitors to the capitol, hearing from the governor or from Utah's representatives in Congress, and so on.
Both chambers spend more time on the floor late in the session. Two reasons: (1) Many bills get introduced late the session, making it impossible to consider them earlier (details), and (2) bills need to get through committee before they come to the floor.
Here is floor time (in each chamber) per week in the most recent General Session:
And here is the same chart going back several years:
Only a handful of bills receive more than passing attention on the floor. This chart depicts a separate vertical line for each bill considered in the most recent General Session, with enacted bills at left and failed bills at right. Bills are sorted by how much floor consideration they received.
Most years, the median enacted bill receives 10-15 minutes of total floor consideration (adding across both chambers). If we assume that 2 minutes of that "consideration" went to House voting, and 2 minutes went to each of the Senate votes (the Senate votes twice on each bill), then deducting 6 total minutes of voting time from the 10-15 minute median implies only 4-9 minutes of actual debate—total, across both chambers—for the median bill. In other words, the median enacted bill receives something like 2-4 minutes of discussion in the House, and 2-4 minutes of cursory discussion in the Senate, before passing.
In the most recent General Session (2023), these bills received the most total floor consideration (combining House and Senate):
| Bill | Total floor consideration (minutes) | Enacted? |
|---|---|---|
| HB0215S03 | 149 | yes |
| SB0016S04 | 110 | yes |
| SB0031S04 | 77 | yes |
| SB0152S03 | 72 | yes |
| HB0427S02 | 69 | yes |
| HJR002S03 | 65 | yes |
| HB0311S03 | 56 | yes |
| HB0467S02 | 50 | yes |
| HB0425S04 | 45 | yes |
| SB0133S02 | 43 | yes |
| HB0250S01 | 43 | yes |
| HB0054S04 | 43 | yes |
| SB0097S02 | 40 | yes |
| SB0093S02 | 38 | yes |
| HB0026S04 | 38 | yes |
| SB0128S05 | 36 | yes |
| SB0105S04 | 36 | no |
| HB0499S03 | 35 | yes |
| SB0156S03 | 33 | yes |
| SB0185S04 | 33 | yes |
In years when legislators pass more bills, they spend less time discussing each bill before passing it.
As noted above, these charts rely on bookmarked tags in the Legislature's archived floor videos. These tags are written by staff. Since the tags are not always written the same way, it gets difficult to aggregate all these tags to identify the main uses of non-bill time. For example, here are the tags that had the most time attached to them in the most recent session, 2023:
| Description | Total floor time (minutes) | As % of all non-bill time |
|---|---|---|
| Standing Committee Reports | 370 | 14% |
| Recess | 302 | 11% |
| Communications from the Senate | 206 | 8% |
| Rules Committee Report | 170 | 6% |
| Announcements | 143 | 5% |
| INTRODUCTION OF BILLS | 120 | 5% |
| Communications | 115 | 4% |
| Prayer, Pledge, Quorum | 90 | 3% |
| Recording 1 | 56 | 2% |
| Saunter | 49 | 2% |
| ROLL CALL | 48 | 2% |
| Rep Acton: Motion to transcribe prayer into House journal | 40 | 1% |
| Call to Order | 39 | 1% |
| Recording 2 | 31 | 1% |
| STATE OF THE JUDICIARY: Justice Matthew R. Durrant | 28 | 1% |
| SPEAKERS OATH OF OFFICE | 28 | 1% |
| Opening Remarks-President Adams | 25 | 1% |
| Cease to Saunter | 22 | 1% |
| Personal Privilege | 21 | 1% |
| Conference Committee Report | 18 | 1% |
Much non-bill time is spent waiting for people to sit down. This time is generally tagged as "Recording 1," "Recording 2," and so on—these tags indicate that the cameras were turned on at the scheduled start of floor time (or perhaps a few minutes early), but nothing has happened yet. Within each chamber, each day starts with "Recording 1," but moves to "Recording 2" (or higher) if the cameras were turned off for a break. By using wildcard searches for things like %Recording%, %Prayer%, %Recognition%, etc, we can get a better sense for how much time was spent in common non-bill activities in 2023:
