Menstrual Equity Legislation: What’s Passed and What’s Coming in the US

Menstrual equity, sometimes called period equity, is the principle that period products should be affordable, available and accessible to everyone who needs them; in legislative terms, that splits into three separate fights, with different opponents and very different success rates: removing sales tax, mandating free provision in specific settings, and funding that provision.

Keeping them separate matters, because a state can lead on one and do nothing on the others. Several of the states that scrapped their tampon tax years ago still have no school mandate at all.

As of July 2026, 18 states still apply their standard sales tax to pads, tampons and menstrual cups. The other 32 either exempt them specifically or have no state sales tax at all, which covers Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon. Minnesota was first, in 1981. Most of the movement came after 2016.

Period Law put the remaining national tax take at around $130 million a year in 2026.

Two things complicate the state-by-state picture. In home-rule states, cities and counties can keep collecting their own local sales tax after the state exemption takes effect, so an exemption isn’t always complete. And period underwear usually falls outside these statutes, because the laws name pads, tampons and cups without naming it.

Progress here isn’t guaranteed either. Utah repealed its tampon tax in 2019 and reinstated it the following year.

Schools are where menstrual equity legislation has traveled furthest. 26 states and Washington, D.C. now have laws supporting free period products in schools, according to the Alliance for Period Supplies as of August 2026.

The gap that defines this area is between requiring and funding. Fewer than half of those states put money behind the mandate. The rest hand districts an obligation and leave the cost in the facilities budget, which is why compliance is uneven even in states that led on the legislation. Grade coverage varies too, from grades 6 to 12 in most states down to grade 3 or earlier in several others.

If you’re working out what your district actually has to do, our guide to free period products in schools covers the state-by-state position in detail.

For private employers, there’s very little. No general federal requirement exists, and outside a handful of state and municipal provisions, stocking period products in a workplace restroom is a policy choice rather than a legal obligation. Most employers who do it are responding to their own people, not to a statute.

Correctional facilities are further along. Around 25 states have enacted laws requiring free products for incarcerated people, according to the Network for Public Health Law as of March 2026. The qualifier matters: only four states, Maryland, Alabama, Colorado and New York, have explicit statutory guarantees of broad access. Elsewhere, the law exists, and the detail is left to each facility.

Something has passed federally. The First Step Act of 2018 requires the Federal Bureau of Prisons to provide free menstrual products. It reaches federal facilities only, so it misses the large majority of incarcerated people, who are held in state prisons and local jails.

The comprehensive bill has not moved. The Menstrual Equity for All Act of 2025 was introduced by Representative Grace Meng on May 29, 2025 and referred to seven House committees. There has been no further action since. It has 71 cosponsors, all Democrats.

One of its provisions would reach commercial buildings directly: employers with 100 or more employees would have to provide free period products. It would also mandate them in federal buildings, require Medicaid coverage, and prohibit state and local taxation of period products outright.

Based on where it sits, planning around it would be premature. The movement is at the state level.

Ohio is the clearest recent example of one that worked. House Bill 29 was signed in December 2025 and took effect on March 20, 2026, after being reintroduced across three general assemblies. It passed unanimously in both chambers. Women who had been denied period products while incarcerated testified to get it there, and the law they helped write stops products being withheld as a punishment.

The bills that fail tend to be the broad ones. Maryland’s attempt to require hygiene products across all public buildings died this year after a fight over whether it applied to men’s restrooms. North Dakota rejected a tampon tax repeal on the grounds that it wasn’t universal tax relief. South Carolina’s repeal only passed once it was paired with an unrelated tax break.

Narrow, specific bills aimed at one setting pass, sometimes unanimously and across party lines. Broad ones that touch several settings at once stall.

Almost every law described above regulates two things: what period products cost, and whether they’re provided. Hardly any of them say anything about what happens to the waste afterwards.

Ohio again, and this time it’s the detail that matters. Ohio Revised Code 5120.631 requires each institution to provide “a separate disposal container with a lid in a safe, designated area” alongside the period products themselves. It’s the only statute we’ve found that treats disposal as part of the requirement rather than an implementation detail.

Everywhere else, a sanitary disposal unit goes into a restroom that may have one receptacle for the whole facility, or none in the stall where it’s needed. The law is satisfied, and the person in the stall still isn’t. We wrote about the scale of the underlying problem in period poverty in America.

Three questions answer most of it.

1. Does your state still tax period products?
2. Does it mandate them in schools, and does it fund that mandate?
3. Does your own facility have somewhere to put them once provided?

The Alliance for Period Supplies maintains current trackers for the first two, updated as sessions close. The third one is yours, and it’s the one no legislature has answered for you.

Get in touch with our team to work out what proper feminine hygiene disposal looks like in your buildings.