NextSpring

Country-wide policy

What The Bahamas Publishes, Who Authorises It, and How Old It Is

Every citation on these pages goes to laws.bahamas.gov.bs, and the question of what that site is has a statutory answer. The Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023, in force since 1 May 2023, repealed and replaced the 1975 Act of the same name. Under it the Law Reform and Revision Commissioner maintains an electronic database of the existing revised edition with amendments incorporated, and that database, made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure, shall be deemed to be an official version of the law. The Attorney-General, not the Minister, now authorises pages into the edition by Law Revision Order and appoints the day a revised edition comes into operation; and under section 28 the Government Printer may, at the Commissioner's request and with the Attorney-General's approval, print a reprint of any Act with its amendments incorporated, which is deemed an authentic copy as at the date of printing. The practical consequences are three. The chapters are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher says it stood at 31 December 2016, so every amendment since sits in a separate Act. Pages inside one chapter can carry different Law Revision Orders, and some are still at the original service of 2001. And the site itself says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street - a disclaimer flatly narrower than the statute that deems the database official.

Verified with official sourceMonitor - can change2026-10-06

Topics it changes

What it requires

  • Read the chapter, then read the Acts that have amended it since 2016 separately
  • Check the list of authorised pages at the front of every chapter: the cut-off differs page by page
  • A reprint of a modern Act carries its own date and is authentic as at that date

At a glance

Revision statute in force: the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023
In force since May 2023
What it did to the old law (Chapter 3)
Repealed it
Who prepares the edition
The Law Reform and Revision Commissioner
Who authorises and commences it
The Attorney-General, by Law Revision Order and by order in the Gazette
Status of the electronic database
Deemed to be an official version of the law
State of the chapters
The 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at the end of December 2016
Law Revision Orders in use
LRO 1/2002, LRO 1/2006, LRO 1/2008, LRO 1/2010 and LRO 1/2017

The publisher lists all five; which one applies is printed on the face of each page.

Who prepared the 2017 pages
The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla

The site is official because a statute says so

Three Caribbean publishers covered here answer the question of authority differently. Trinidad's portal prints UNOFFICIAL VERSION on every page because no Order has designated it. Saint Lucia's revised edition sits on a .com domain and is authentic because its Revised Edition of the Laws Act makes a data bank a statutory format. The Bahamas is closest to Saint Lucia: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database maintained by the Commissioner and made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. The Commission manages laws.bahamas.gov.bs and says so. The oddity is that the site's own About page then says the authoritative texts can be found in the Official Gazettes, which can be purchased from Government Publications on Bay Street - a narrower claim than the one Parliament made for it.

The cut-off is per page, not per Act

Section 6A of the repealed 1975 Act, re-enacted as section 25(4) of the 2023 Act, works by authorising individual pages into the edition and requiring each page to bear on its face the Law Revision Order that put it there. Every chapter therefore opens with a list of authorised pages, and the list is frequently mixed. The Immigration Act shows pages 1 to 18D at LRO 1/2017, 19 to 22 as Original, 23 to 28B at LRO 1/2017, 29 to 30 at LRO 1/2010, 31 to 32 as Original and 33 to 41 at LRO 1/2017 - six bands in one Act. Section 22, the section that sets the eight-month visitor ceiling, sits in the Original band and its pages are footed [Original Service 2001]. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout. So a single document can be twenty-five years old in one place and nine years old in another, and nothing says so except the page footer.

What the 2016 cut-off hides

The site's About page states what the database is: the consolidated electronic database of the 2000 Revised Edition in force as at 31 December 2016, plus new and amending legislation in force since. That means the chapters do not contain post-2016 amendments at all. For the Immigration Act the gap is large - six amending Acts since 2016, including the one that created the economic permanent residence certificate, the one that put a figure of one million dollars in it, the one that created a licensing regime for immigration consultants, and the one that exempted short business visits. A reader who takes Chapter 191 as the law gets a 2016 answer to a 2026 question. Every citation on these pages carries the cut-off and, where it matters, what has changed since.

What the law says

Text layer - verbatim verifiedLaw Reform and Revision Act, 2023, s. 33 · Section 33
«The Law Reform and Revision Act *(Ch. 3)* is hereby repealed.»

The asterisks are the extraction's rendering of the publisher's italics for the chapter reference. The repealed Act is still served as Chapter 3 on the same website and carries nothing on its face to say so; it no longer appears in the publisher's own index of Acts in force.

Read it at the source
About this source

The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedLaw Reform and Revision Act, 2023, s. 12(2) · Section 12, sub-section (2)
«shall be deemed to be an official version of the law»

The sub-section reads: The Commissioner may cause to be published any of the databases prepared under subsection (1) in printed or electronic form and such database may be made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure and shall be deemed to be an official version of the law. Section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition.

Read it at the source
About this source

The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedLaw Reform and Revision Act, 2023, s. 19 · Section 19
«A revised edition shall come into operation on such date as the Attorney-General may by order published in the Gazette, appoint.»

Under the repealed 1975 Act this was done by the Governor-General, and only on a resolution of the House of Assembly. The authority moved to the Attorney-General in 2023.

Read it at the source
About this source

The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedLaw Reform and Revision Act, 2023, s. 28 · Section 28
«such copies shall be deemed to be authentic copies of the written law so amended as at the date of such printing.»

The power is exercised by the Government Printer on the Commissioner's request and with the Attorney-General's approval. It is why the Business Licence Act, 2023 is published as a reprint signed by the Attorney-General and dated, and why that reprint carries its own cut-off of 1 July 2024.

Read it at the source
About this source

The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedLaw Reform and Revision Act (Ch. 3), s. 6A(3) · Section 6A, sub-section (3) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
«Every page comprised in the Laws shall bear on its face or overleaf a reference to the Law Revision Order by which its inclusion therein is authorised.»

Quoted from the repealed 1975 Act because it is the provision that created the page-by-page system still visible in every chapter's list of authorised pages. Section 25(4)(c) of the 2023 Act re-enacts it.

Read it at the source
About this source

The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.

We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source

Practical notes

The 2017 pages were prepared by a private body: The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla, as the publisher's About page states. That is normal in the region and worth knowing, because it means the consolidation was done by a contractor rather than by the Commission's own staff.

The publisher serves a bot-challenge page instead of a document on part of its traffic, and the challenge page is indistinguishable from a reading unless the length is checked. Four documents we needed - the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act, the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024 and the Tariff Act, 2023 - could not be read for that reason or because of a server error, and all four are recorded in the unread sources catalogue rather than treated as silent.

This record rests on the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 read in full, on the repealed Law Reform and Revision Act Chapter 3, on the About This Site page of laws.bahamas.gov.bs, and on the lists of authorised pages printed in each chapter cited elsewhere in this country.