How the eCFR Banner Tells You a Page's Currency

Every eCFR content page — for example, 24 CFR 30.35 — carries a banner directly under the title heading that labels the content “authoritative but unofficial” and names two dates: how current the underlying data is, and when the title was last substantively amended. Those two dates answer different questions, and reading them correctly is the point of this article.

This original record-reading guide is a general reading aid, not cited evidence. It does not depict a source record; the article text and source links provide the facts.

Key points

• The banner on an eCFR content page states: “This content is from the eCFR and is authoritative but unofficial.” (source)
• The same banner gives two distinct dates in one line: “Displaying title 24, up to date as of 9/03/2026. Title 24 was last amended 8/20/2026.” (source)
• “Up to date as of” reports data currency — how recently the eCFR’s content was refreshed — while “last amended” reports the date of the most recent substantive change to the title.
• The eCFR’s own reader aid confirms this banner’s placement is universal: “You can find how current the material is at the top of all eCFR content pages.” (source)

What the banner says

Open any eCFR content page, and the first thing under the title is a notice: “This content is from the eCFR and is authoritative but unofficial.” (ecfr.gov) That phrase is doing two jobs at once — telling readers the text is the government’s own compiled regulation text (authoritative), while also flagging that the eCFR is not the legally official version of record (unofficial). The Federal Register and the printed Code of Federal Regulations remain the official texts; the eCFR is a continuously updated, unofficial editorial version of the same material.

What the two dates mean

Directly beneath that label, the banner adds a second line naming two dates. On the 24 CFR 30.35 page it reads: “Displaying title 24, up to date as of 9/03/2026. Title 24 was last amended 8/20/2026.” (ecfr.gov)

These are not the same date, and they answer different questions:

• “Up to date as of” — this is a data-currency date. It tells you how recently the eCFR system itself was refreshed against its underlying sources.
• “Last amended” — this is a substantive-change date. It tells you when the title last received an actual textual amendment, regardless of when the display was last refreshed.

A reader who only glances at one date and assumes it answers the other question will draw the wrong conclusion about what changed and when.

Where this banner appears

This is not a one-off feature of the 24 CFR 30.35 page. The eCFR’s own explanation of its update process states plainly: “You can find how current the material is at the top of all eCFR content pages.” (ecfr.gov) In other words, whatever title or part a reader is looking at, the same banner format — authoritative-but-unofficial label plus the two dates — sits at the top of that content page.

Banner limitations

The banner is scoped to the title as a whole, not to the individual section a reader happens to be viewing. Because of that, a section page itself never displays its own, separate currency date — the dates in the banner describe the title, not the specific section below it. A reader cannot read a per-section “as of” date off the page; the banner’s dates apply title-wide.

The banner also does not indicate whether a rule that has already taken legal effect has been incorporated into the text displayed on the page yet. “Up to date as of” describes how current the eCFR’s data is, not whether a specific already-effective change has been folded into the section text a reader is looking at. Confirming that requires checking the underlying Federal Register document for that rule separately.

Source links

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-24/part-30/section-30.35 https://www.ecfr.gov/reader-aids/understanding-the-ecfr/how-is-the-ecfr-updated