July is here, and that means it’s busy season again on Beacon Hill

AN ANNUAL STATE BUDGET, a long-awaited energy affordability bill, a jobs package that may or may not feature reforms to spur desperately needed housing production, more frequent financial disclosures from statewide ballot question campaigns — there’s no shortage of weighty topics for the Legislature to tackle in the next 30 days.

Welcome to another even-year July, the final month for major new business in the 2025-2026 lawmaking term.

As is the case every cycle, legislative action will crescendo over the next four-plus weeks, all leading up to a July 31 deadline. But there’s a key difference this time around that will make the final day of the month a little less dramatic: The House and Senate simply need to each approve initial proposals by then and begin cross-branch negotiations, not produce a final compromise that wins support from both chambers.

The list of what needs to happen by the time the calendar flips to August was already substantial, and lawmakers keep adding to it. Wednesday alone will feature a Senate vote on legislation aimed at reining in household utility costs, a House vote on a bill to require more frequent financial disclosures from ballot question campaigns, and movement in both chambers on a compromise state budget for fiscal year 2027.

Here’s what to expect.

Legislation in play

Top lawmakers on Monday announced a “deal in principle” on the fiscal 2027 state budget, and they teed up a vote on the $63.4 billion package for Wednesday.

The timing of the vote means Massachusetts will once again fail to have an annual budget signed into law before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. The last time a governor signed an on-time annual budget was for fiscal year 2011.

It’s the second year in a row in which legislative negotiators have at least settled on terms before the official end of the fiscal year. In each of the six prior budget cycles led by Ways and Means Committee chairs Aaron Michlewitz and Michael Rodrigues, those agreements didn’t happen until several days or weeks into July.

“We’re two for eight. I like that,” Rodrigues quipped in an interview with CommonWealth Beacon.

The budget increases state spending about 4 percent over the prior year. As is often the case, it’s packed with additional measures, such as a one-year extension to a program making more people eligible for subsidized ConnectorCare health coverage and new infrastructure and training requirements intended to limit the harms of wrong-way driving.

Rodrigues said he does not expect the comparatively early completion of the massive package to have much impact on the workload for the rest of July.

“The onus of conferencing the budget falls pretty squarely on myself and Chair Michlewitz, and the rest of my colleagues would be busy anyway,” he said. “It really doesn’t affect what we tackle for the rest of the month.”

While the House is in session to tackle the budget, representatives will also take up a proposal overhauling campaign finance transparency for ballot question campaigns.

The bill, a similar version of which cleared the Senate in January, would require both supporters and opponents to report fundraising and spending data at least once a month and more frequently closer to elections, similar to the deadlines already in place for individual candidates. Current law features an eight-month blackout period in which ballot question campaigns do not need to reveal any financial information from January to September of election years.

Another section of the House bill would require campaigns to disclose if they use paid signature-gatherers to collect the tens of thousands of signatures needed for the ballot, and prohibit firms from charging for that work on a per-signature basis.

Paid signature-gathering has long been a feature of the state’s political landscape, but lawmakers grew increasingly wary of the practice this cycle amid a surge in ballot questions filed — many of which tap into frustration with the Legislature among voters and activists.

“Over the past several years, we have seen a growing number of well-funded special interest groups turn to the ballot to advance their agendas through one up-or-down vote, bypassing the negotiation and compromise inherent to the legislative process,” House Speaker Ron Mariano said in a statement Tuesday. “Oftentimes, the opposition is equally well-resourced, which has led to high-stakes litigation and, in some cases, judicial removal of questions from the ballot.”

The House bill also adds kindling for more sweeping changes to the process. It would task a new commission with studying faults in the existing ballot question framework, such as the attorney general’s limited scope when reviewing a proposal’s eligibility, and recommending changes — including by amending the state Constitution, which would require support from both lawmakers and also voters.

“Ultimately, this bill will help to ensure that the initiative petition process is working as it was intended when it was ratified in 1918, and that it will remain worthy of the public’s trust,” Mariano said.

That’s just the short list of major bills set for action this week, and the horizon is dotted with several other major topics. It’s not clear when lawmakers will take up Gov. Maura Healey’s economic development bond bill, or if the House intends to surface its own version of Senate-approved primary care access legislation.

The timeline for action

Legislative leaders obviously have a lot to do this month, but they’re optimistic that the tail end of July will be less chaotic for everyone involved than in 2024 and 2022, when the final formal sessions that began July 31 stretched overnight, past sunrise, and into the late morning on August 1.

At the time, the Legislature was working under an internal rule that had been in place since 1995 calling for only informal sessions — where a single lawmaker’s objection can stall any bill’s passage — after August 1 in the second year of the term. That provision was designed to free up time for campaign season and also to prevent shady lame-duck deals after Election Day.

In practice, the language meant that lawmakers spent decades trying to get everything significant approved and on the governor’s desk by the time the final gavel fell, pushing House-Senate negotiators into late-night scrambles over how to reconcile competing versions of massive bills.

After the back-to-back pileups in the past two terms, legislative leaders made a change. They tweaked the rule so that formal sessions are still possible after July 31 in year two, but only to enact a House-Senate compromise on any bill whose negotiations started before the deadline, to take up newly filed spending bills, and to respond to a governor’s vetoes or amendments.

Now, the House and Senate each need only to approve an initial draft of anything they want to remain in play for the rest of the year, and negotiating teams can then spend months longer hashing out the details on a compromise with less pressure. (Whether January 6, 2027 — the last day of the 2025-2026 term — becomes its own last-minute scramble replacing the July 31 fracas is TBD.)

“The whole point behind the July 31 extension for conferences was to take the pressure off the last couple of weeks and say, ‘We’re close here, if we meet a few more times on this, we can wrap this up before the end,’” Mariano told reporters this month.

Or put more simply: they just have to get every significant bill into a conference committee by July 31, not come up with a final agreement and ship it to Healey. The speaker thinks that will make everything “smoother.”

“It’s gotta go better than it’s gone in the past,” he said.

Added Aaron Michlewitz, Mariano’s budget chief and right-hand man, “It can’t go worse.”