A raft of new legislation is set to take effect for Californians in 2026 after Governor Gavin Newsom signed hundreds of bills over the past year.

The new legislation affects a wide range of issues, such as reducing drug costs, increasing the minimum wage and possibly barring police officers and federal agents from wearing face masks.

Why It Matters

Many of the measures reflect the state’s ongoing push to address affordability, equity and transparency—often amid tension with President Donald Trump’s White House.

The changes directly affect millions of residents, employers, landlords, students and consumers in the nation’s most populous state, serving as a bellwether for legislative trends nationwide.

What To Know

Here is a breakdown of some of the key laws set to go into effect in California in 2026:

1. Minimum wage increase

The minimum wage is set to increase across the state from $16.50 to $16.90 per hour for all employees.

Several local municipalities are also increasing their minimum wages further, as they are allowed to set wages higher than the state minimum.

2. Reduction to drug costs

From January 1, Senate Bill 40 would require large state-regulated health insurers to cap insulin co-pays at $35 for a 30-day supply. The same requirement takes effect for smaller plans in 2027.

Californians would also have access to low-cost, state-branded CalRx insulin, priced at $55 for five pens.

3. Gender-neutral restrooms in schools

Starting July 1, every California public school must provide at least one gender-neutral restroom, as mandated by SB 760.

4. Police identification and mask ban

From January 1, local and federal law enforcement officers would generally be barred from wearing masks to conceal their identities and must display visible identification when performing enforcement duties.

These measures, codified in SB 627 and SB 805, are facing legal challenges from federal entities.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said the department would not comply with the law.

5. Ban on cat declawing

Declawing cats for nonmedical reasons is set to be prohibited statewide. The practice is widely condemned as inhumane by animal welfare advocates.

6. Combating auto scams

Consumers who buy or lease a new or used car from a dealer would have the right to return it for a full refund within three days of purchase. California is set to become the first state in the nation to offer the protection.

7. Single-use plastic bag ban

From January 1, major changes to the state’s plastics policy go into effect, banning all plastic carryout bags—even thicker varieties previously permitted. Stores would only be allowed to distribute recycled paper bags, subject to a minimum charge.

8. AI transparency and protections

AI operators must clearly disclose when chatbots are not real people, and companies must implement safeguards to prevent chatbots from encouraging self-harm in minors.

Additional AI regulations are set to increase transparency, ban chatbots from impersonating health care professionals and require new police reporting on AI use.

9. Required appliances in rentals

Landlords would be legally required to provide working refrigerators and stoves in rental apartments from January 1.

10. Extended window for sexual assault lawsuits

A new law, AB 250, creates a two-year window—from January 1, 2026, to December 31, 2027—for adult survivors of sexual assaults to file lawsuits alleging a cover-up. It would allow these individuals to file cases even if the usual statute of limitations lapsed.

What People Are Saying

California Governor Gavin Newsom said in October regarding the legislation on drug costs: “I am pleased to sign SB 41, a bill that will lower health care costs for all Californians. This bill, together with related efforts in the 2025 budget and CalRx, represents the most aggressive effort in the country to lower prescription drug costs. California continues to lead the way in lowering costs, increasing transparency, and ensuring that the savings are passed on to payers and consumers.”

He wrote in a letter in September regarding the ban on officers wearing masks: “Acting on behalf of an authoritarian President, federal immigration authorities are spreading fear and terror throughout California with indiscriminate raids that have rounded up American citizens, people legally in the United States, working parents, and even children.

“America should never be a country where masked ‘secret police’ grab people off the streets and throw them into unmarked vans and speed away. It is unacceptable that government agents, guns in hand, have seized our neighbors while wearing masks under the pretense of protecting themselves when they are, in fact, hiding from public accountability and sowing fear to intimidate the American people.

“For the safety of both the public and law enforcement, Californians must know they are interacting with legitimate law enforcement officers, rather than masked vigilantes.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in November in response to the measure: “Law enforcement officers risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe, and they do not deserve to be doxed or harassed simply for carrying out their duties. California’s anti-law enforcement policies discriminate against the federal government and are designed to create risk for our agents. These laws cannot stand.”

The Trump administration is making good on a promise to send more water to California farmers in the state’s crop-rich Central Valley.

The US Bureau of Reclamation on Thursday announced a new plan for operating the Central Valley Project, a vast system of pumps, dams and canals that direct water southward from the state’s wetter north.

It follows an executive order President Donald Trump signed in January calling for more water to flow to farmers, arguing the state was wasting the precious resource in the name of protecting endangered fish species.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the plan will help the federal government “strengthen California’s water resilience.”

It takes effect Friday.

But California officials and environmental groups blasted the move, saying sending significantly more water to farmlands could threaten water delivery to the rest of the state and would harm salmon and other fish.

Most of the state’s water is in the north, but most of its people are in the south.

The federally-managed Central Valley Project works in tandem with the state-managed State Water Project, which sends water to cities that supply 27 million Californians.

The systems transport water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, an estuary that provides critical habitat to fish and wildlife including salmon and the delta smelt.

It is important for the two systems to work together, Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, said in a statement.

She warned the Trump administration’s plan could limit the state’s ability to send water to cities and farmers.

That is because the state could be required to devote more water to species protection if the federal project sends more to farms.

Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director at Restore the Delta, said pumping more water out would result in more Delta smelt and juvenile salmon dying from getting stuck in the pumping system, and once the temperature warms, harmful algae blooms will develop that are dangerous to fish, wildlife, pets and people.

That could have economic impacts, she said.

“When you destroy water quality and divorce it from land, you are also destroying property values,” she said. “Nobody wants to live near a fetid, polluted backwater swamp.”

The Bureau of Reclamation denied the changes would harm the environment or endangered species.

The Central Valley Project primarily sends water to farms, with a much smaller amount going to cities and industrial use. Water from the Central Valley Project irrigates roughly one-third of all California agriculture, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

The Westlands Water District, one of the largest uses of Central Valley Project water, cheered the decision.

It “will help ensure that our growers have the water they need to support local communities and the nation’s food supply, while also protecting California’s wildlife,” Allison Febbo, general manager, said in a statement.

During Trump’s first term, he allowed more water to be directed to the Central Valley, a move Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom fought in court, saying it would push endangered delta smelt, chinook salmon and steelhead trout populations to extinction.

The Biden administration changed course, adopting its own water plan in 2024 that environmental groups said was a modest improvement. Newsom didn’t immediately comment Thursday on the new decision.

The Republican president renewed his criticism of the state’s water policies after the Los Angeles-area fires broke out in January and some fire hydrants ran dry.

The Central Valley Project does not supply water to Los Angeles.

Trump dubbed his January executive order “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California.”

The ShakeAlert computer system that warns about the imminent arrival of shaking from earthquakes sent out a false alarm Thursday morning for a magnitude 5.9 temblor in Carson City, Nev., that did not actually happen.

The ShakeAlert blared on both the MyShake app and the Wireless Emergency Alert system — similar to an Amber Alert — on phones across the region, including in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento area, and in eastern California, just after 8 a.m.

It wasn’t immediately clear why the ShakeAlert system was activated, or how many phones got the incorrect alerts. The earthquake report was later deleted from the MyShake app — which carries earthquake early warnings from the U.S. Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert system — and from the USGS earthquake website.

“We did not detect any earthquakes,” said Paul Caruso, a USGS geophysicist, Thursday morning.

The ShakeAlert system has previously proved effective in giving seconds of warning ahead of expected shaking coming from significant earthquakes, including from a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in San Diego County in April; earthquakes in El Sereno and the Malibu area last year; and a temblor east of San José in 2022.

“We’re in the process of figuring out what happened,” said Robert de Groot, an operations team leader for the U.S. Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert system.

There have been other times when earthquake early warnings have misfired.

In 2023, a scheduled drill of the MyShake app at 10:19 a.m. rang instead at 3:19 a.m., which occurred because the warning was inadvertently scheduled for 10:19 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, instead of Pacific time.

And in 2021, phone users across Northern California got a warning of a magnitude 6 earthquake in Truckee, near Lake Tahoe; but the quake that actually occurred was a far more modest magnitude 4.7. Scientists said the significant overestimation of the quake’s magnitude was in part caused by it being on the edge of the ShakeAlert seismic network sensors, and that researchers worked on reprogramming the computer system to avoid a similar issue in the future.