In the early morning of Saturday, May 31, the 104th General Assembly adjourned its spring legislative session. Lawmakers passed the final budget and implementation plan for Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, including nearly $240 million in new investments aligned to Raising Illinois’ comprehensive priorities for expecting families, infants and toddlers. Read our full response to the FY 2026 budget.

Legislators also approved several other bills that advance our prenatal-to-age-three policy goals during this session. The following measures, organized by our coalition’s focus areas, now either await the Governor’s signature or have recently been signed into law:

Healthy Parents & Babies

• HB 2464, prohibiting private insurers from charging out-of-network rates on emergency services provided to an infant in any neonatal intensive care unit.
• HB 2517, requiring health care professionals who provide maternal health care services to complete a training on maternal health risk factors for marginalized racial or ethnic groups with increased maternal mortality rates, as part of an existing implicit bias training requirement.
• HB 2688, facilitating expanded access to out-of-hospital birth services in a licensed birth center and home birth services provided by a certified nurse midwife.
• SB 73, mandating baby food manufacturers to test their products for arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury at least monthly, report the results to the Illinois Department of Public Health and disclose testing information to consumers.
• SB 1346, requiring health insurance plans other than Medicaid to include, in an annual statement of all basic health care services covered by the plan, those services mandated by any newly enacted law or rule. It also extends the existing health care benefit insurance card requirement to health benefit plans that offer dental coverage.
• SB 2437, among other provisions, requiring hospitals and birthing centers to allow a Medicaid-enrolled doula of the patient’s choice to be present before, during and after labor and childbirth, and for the doula to not count against the patient’s guest quota.

High-Quality Early Learning

• HR 137, urging the new Department of Early Childhood to award the remaining funding for the Early Childhood Construction Grant awards to community-based providers.
• HB 3327, requiring hospitals to provide written information on the Early Intervention (EI) program to any parent or guardian whose child is admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit and, if the child is eligible, to initiate a written referral for EI services prior to discharge.
• HB 3439, improving basic child care licensing functions regarding provisional hiring and requiring staff background checks to be completed every five years instead of every three years.

Financially Secure Families

• HB 2978, the Family Neonatal Intensive Care Leave Act, entitling employees in a workplace with 16 or more employees to protected unpaid time off when a child of the employee is a patient in a neonatal intensive care unit.
• SB 212, entitling employees to reasonable break time that is compensated at their regular rate if they need to express breast milk in the first year following a nursing infant child’s birth.

Strong Infrastructure

• HB 3446, requiring the new Illinois Department of Early Childhood to publish and update annually a comprehensive list of college early childhood courses that child care teachers and director candidates can take to meet required qualifications.
• HB 3528, the Affordable Student Teaching Act, prohibiting institutions of higher education from requiring student teaching for preservice teachers to be unpaid, which will reduce financial barriers for student teachers and help with recruitment and retention.
• SB 406, directing the new Illinois Department of Early Childhood to establish an Early Childhood Integrated Data System that allows for cross-agency collaboration to simplify processes and inform decision making.

Coming up next, the General Assembly reconvenes briefly this fall to hold its veto session from October 14-30. Be sure to follow @raisingillinois on Twitter/X and Facebook to learn more all year long!