September 2026 Release Notes

The GovInfo team worked hard over the summer months developing new features and functionality. The September 2026 GovInfo release delivered 71 individually tracked changes. Key highlights include expanding the Annual Reports Derived Collection to feature GPO and Congressional Committee Print publications, updating the Copy Bookmarkable URL feature, enhancing the Bulk Data Repository, and adding support for Excel files in the Congressional Hearings collection. The release also delivered bug fixes, design improvements, security patches, component upgrades, and other enhancements.

New Features

Annual Reports Derived Collection Expanded

Expanding on the development from our previous release, additional Annual Reports have been incorporated into this derived collection. Annual Reports are reports produced by Federal agencies and other entities of the U.S. Government to document performance, financial, and program activities of the preceding year. The Annual Reports collection is a compilation of related publications from packages across several collections, and the collection can be browsed or searched.

Support for Excel Files in the Congressional Hearings Collection

As part of our continued efforts to support our congressional data partners, GPO added support for Excel files in the Congressional Hearings Collection. If a congressional committee provides an Excel XSLX file as part of a hearing, GPO can provide public access to the file on GovInfo. Similar to other file renditions, the Excel XLSX file will be accessible directly from the content details page, search results, browse pages, and via the API.

XHTML Support Added to Bulk Data and Bills Collection Browse

As part of our ongoing efforts to prepare for the deprecation of in-browser XSLT 1.0 support, we have expanded our XHTML rendition coverage across affected collections. With this release, XHTML support is now available on the Congressional Bills browse page and for packages retrieved via Citation Search.

XHTML can be found when clicking on the dropdown on the XML button that appears on the browse, search, or content details pages.

Additionally, as part of recent server-side rendering updates, GPO refreshed the design of the Bulk Data Repository; the underlying functionality has not changed. Design changes include a change to the location banner that lets the user know where they are within the repository, as well as the buttons to download the selected bulk data files.

New Content

Notable Content Submissions

Over 74,700 content packages (roughly equivalent to one bound printed document) were made available from July 1 to September 30. Notable submissions since the last release included:

• Budget FY 2027 - Mid-Session Review, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2027
• 8,712 reports and documents from the U.S. Congressional Serial Set
• 932 historical Congressional Hearings
• U.S. Statutes at Large volumes 136 and 137
• 116 reports submitted by Federal agencies into the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection (bringing the total to over 1,196)
• Interim packages for the Privacy Act Issuances collection
• Volumes 584, 585, and 586 of the United States Reports
• 1,804 documents that were acquired through GPO’s Cataloging and Indexing Program
• Over 15,000 Depository Shipping Lists from 1994-1988
• Railroad Retirement Board publications
• Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Environmental Studies
• 1,161 Department of the Interior Office of Education and Bureau of Education Publications
• Peace Corps, Office of the Inspector General Publications
• Volume 41, No.1 and No.2 of the FCC Record: A comprehensive compilation of decisions, reports, public notices and other documents of the Federal Communications Commission of the United States
• Partnership publications from the Indiana State Library, including Volumes 35-37 of the Decisions of the Department of the Interior and the General Land Office in Cases Relating to the Public Lands

Serial Set Digitization Progress

The Government Publishing Office has made progress on our collaboration with the Law Library of Congress to digitize and describe the U.S. Congressional Serial Set. In Fiscal Year 2026, GPO ingested 38,656 Congressional Reports and Documents from 2,087 Serial Set volumes, bringing us to 11,914 Serial Set volumes available on GovInfo today. Explore the collection on the Serial Set browse page.

Feature Articles and Presentations

Nine feature articles were published in GovInfo from July 1 to September 30. The features acknowledged Korean War Armistice Day 2026, National History Day® 2026-2027, Labor Day 2026, September 11, 2026, 25 Years Later, National Preparedness Month, 2026, National Public Lands Day 2026, as well as a special article about the release of the Annual Reports Collection. Other features included Art in Government Publications Series, Part 3: Art in U.S. Federal Buildings and the June 2026 Release Notes. Additionally, the Government Publishing Office presented updates and future plans at the Federal Depository Library Pre-Conference. The recording can be found on the Federal Depository Library Program’s website.

Additional Release Enhancements

• Migrated to server-side rendering for the United States Courts, Economic Report of the President, History of Bills, List of CFR Sections Affected, Economic Indicators and Serial Set collection content details pages.
• Improved the Bookmarkable URL copy functionality for the Advanced and Citation Search forms.
• Continued development and user acceptance testing for the new user interface of the internal content management system.
• Improved the note metadata field in the Congressional Hearings collection.
• Continued development on the GovInfo search engine upgrades.
• Modified the Government Publications related documents functionality when there are over one hundred relationships.
• Updated USLM XML converter code.
• Added new identification logic within associated collections for the Annual Reports collection.
• Developed a consolidated reference lookup to streamline internal handling for government agencies and associated metadata.
• Reduced duplication in the Organization filter for the Congressionally Mandated Reports collection.
• Fixed a bug with the titles displaying in the Share module for Congressionally Mandated Reports.
• Updated the data field name for Government Manual packages on the Content Details page.
• Cleaned up the formatting of the collection names for the Citation Search.
• Fixed government author reference lookup parsing bugs in the Government Publications collection.
• Completed parser refactoring for Code of Federal Regulations, Congressional Hearings, Congressional Prints, Statutes at Large, Congressional Record Index, Federal Record, and Congressional Record (Bound Edition).
• Conducted routine maintenance of the internal repository database to improve performance.
• Completed biennial content integrity and file format validations.
• Performed various software and security upgrades on multiple internal and external components, including PDF software and validation tools.



About Release Notes -- Changes to GovInfo components are made through code deployments on a quarterly release cycle. Release Notes are published after deployments to highlight some of the key changes, summarize other noteworthy activities, and recap new content, feature articles, and top searches since the previous release. Read previous editions of Release Notes.