The above question, in one form or another, is one of the questions most frequently asked of legislative staff. It is a question that has no simple, meaningful answer. Why is this so?
Overall, the Legislature exists to consider legislation. Many costs are fixed at a specific level and do not change whether there are more or less bills. Some people suggest dividing the total cost of the Legislature by the number of bills to calculate the cost of each bill. This logic suggests that the more bills the Legislature considers, the less each bill costs. This really makes little sense, although it probably is true to some extent that the marginal cost of one more bill could be regarded as less than the cost of all bills averaged since there would have to be an ability to handle all the other bills anyway.
Time and materials costs associated with a bill include time to record and track a request for a bill draft, time spent by staff drafting the bill and preparing it for introduction, cost of printing the bill for each reading, cost of preparing the bill for review by the Governor, cost of printing the bill in the Session Laws, and codification costs. Each of these costs varies with the size and complexity of a bill. No one has ever done the kind of cost accounting that would be required to pin these numbers down and allow a meaningful average and range to be documented.
So it remains impossible to give a meaningful answer to the question, "How much does a bill cost?"
