The Federal Register is the source for all generally applicable federal rules and regulations, published in the following order: (1) presidential documents; (2) rules and regulations; (3) proposed rules; (4) notices; and (5) Notice of Sunshine Act meetings. The arrangement of documents within each section is determined by the title of the Code of Federal Regulations. Some documents are published, out of order, in separate sections at the end of each issue. Finding aids appear at the end of each issue, including: telephone number lists, a list of CFR sections affected, a list of public laws received by the Office of the Federal Register from Congress, and a weekly checklist of current CFR volumes. The Federal Register is published daily.
While the Federal Register is more or less a chronological arrangement of executive documents, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is an arrangement of federal regulations, currently in force, by subject. The fifty titles of the CFR often correspond to the statutes in the U.S.C., but the true arrangement lies in the fact that the agencies are grouped together by subject, allowing all rules and regulations of a particular agency to be kept together. Each of the fifty titles is divided into chapters; some of which are further divided into sub-chapters. Each chapter is devoted to a particular agency. In the back of each volume is an alphabetical list of agencies, indicating the title and chapter of a particular agency’s regulations. Regulations from each agency are divided into Parts, consisting of a body of regulations regarding a particular agency function. The Code of Federal Regulation is updated one time each year in four parts. Titles 1-16 are updated January 1st; titles 17-16 are updated April 1st; titles 28-41 are updated July 1; titles 42-50 are updated October 1st. Each annual volume of the CFR appears in a different color.