A new study out by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University itemizes each state’s regulatory or administrative code to tally up the number of regulations they impose upon their citizens and businesses.

North Carolina’s code racks up 109,244 such restrictions or mandates according to the study. While this number sounds overwhelming, it puts North Carolina in the middle of the pack nationally, coming in at the 27th most.

Unsurprisingly, California is far away in first place, with more than 420,000 regulations.

Policy areas most populated by regulations in North Carolina include: Environmental protection/public utilities/natural resources (31,229), health services (23.460), and industry/commerce/development (20,711).

Regulatory overreach is not benign. Research by Mercatus concludes that growth in regulation “is correlated with increased poverty rates, lost jobs, and higher inflation, among other effects.”

Moreover, higher levels of regulation come with greater bureaucracy and administrative bloat in state government, resulting in bigger budgets, higher taxes, and greater unfunded liabilities for state employees.

While North Carolina is in the middle of the pack nationally, and thankfully a far cry from California, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Mercatus offers two primary recommendations to counter the proliferation of regulations. First, a “regulatory budget” in which the state places a cap on the number of regulations lower than the current number, combined with a rule that for every new regulation created, a certain number must be taken off the books. This is also one of the recommendations provided in the Locke Foundation’s 2024-25 Policy Solutions Guide.

Secondly, a sunset requirement that ensures all regulations be removed after a certain number of years unless explicitly renewed by the legislature. North Carolina enacted a version of this in 2013 for administrative rules. The periodic reviews are performed just once every ten years, however, a timeline that should be shortened.

Other recommendations to address excess regulations that Locke has proposed include expanding to other industries the “regulatory sandbox” approved for the finance and insurance industries in 2021. A regulatory sandbox temporarily lifts restrictions for specific industries to allow for greater innovation, with the potential to evaluate if those restrictions are unnecessary and can be eliminated permanently. Requiring regulatory rules imposing costs above a certain threshold to receive legislative scrutiny before passing a bill approving it would be another safeguard against out-of-control bureaucracy.

To determine the number of regulations in each state, Mercatus tallied up the number of occurrences of the words and phrases “shall,” “must,” “may not,” “required,” and “prohibited” in each state’s regulations, which serves as a proxy for the number of prohibitions and obligations in the state’s regulatory text.