The U.S. Department of Education published a final rule that removes the vacated 2024 Title IX regulation from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the regulatory text that existed before that rulemaking. The rule, Recodification of Title IX Rules, is effective September 29, 2026.
The 2024 rule redefined sex discrimination under Title IX to include gender identity. Two federal courts vacated it in full: the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky on January 9, 2025, and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on February 19, 2025. The Kentucky vacatur rested in part on the finding that redefining “sex” to include gender identity exceeded the Department’s authority under Title IX. Appeals from both judgments were dismissed in May 2026.
The Department has not been enforcing the 2024 rule. On January 31, 2025, it announced it would enforce the regulations that existed before that rulemaking, and it has done so since. The Federal Register states that this action does not change the rules already in force. It updates the CFR so the published code matches what the Department is already enforcing.
What returns to the code is the pre-2024 text, including the 2020 Title IX regulations. The Department leaves out a few provisions it describes as obsolete or already vacated, as the Federal Register explains — a long-expired athletics adjustment period, expired compliance deadlines from the 1970s, a cross-reference appendix removed earlier in 2026, and one sentence on cross-examination that a court vacated in 2021.
In a September 28, 2026 press release, the Department said the rulemaking clears the 2024 rewrite from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the 2020 regulation in the published code. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the Department has been enforcing that earlier text already.
Primary sources
- Federal Register: Recodification of Title IX Rules (Sept. 29, 2026)
- U.S. Department of Education press release (Sept. 28, 2026)