State Preemption Index (2026)

Preemption is the quiet force behind most “why doesn't my city just ban this” questions. When a state legislature passes a preemption statute, it reserves a subject for itself: cities and counties in that state cannot regulate it at all, or only within limits the state sets. The local ordinance you expect to find simply cannot exist, and a city council that passes one anyway will see it voided in court.

The pattern differs sharply by subject. Firearms are preempted in the large majority of states; minimum wage and paid leave in a substantial bloc; plastic-bag rules in about a dozen, where statutes forbid regulating “auxiliary containers.” Some preemption is old and settled, some was passed specifically to nullify one city's ordinance. The direction runs the other way too: solar-rights and right-to-farm statutes preempt local and private restrictions rather than local freedoms.

The score on this page is a count, not a legal rating. For each state it adds up the state-level rules in our database that are either filed under one of five categories (firearms, tobacco, single-use items, employment, right-to-farm) or have a summary containing a preemption phrase such as “preempt” or “cities cannot.” Every rule in those five categories is counted, whether or not it restricts local governments: a concealed-carry licensing rule or a tobacco purchase age counts the same as an express preemption statute. A state's score therefore rises with the number of rules we have published for it. It does not measure how broad or how strict that state's preemption is. Use the topic pages to compare states on a single subject, and a state's own page to read its rules.