On September 29, 2026, the Department of Education published a final rule titled Recodification of Title IX Rules (RIN 1870-AA26, 91 FR 61308). It took effect the same day. The rule repeals the 2024 Title IX amendments, which federal courts vacated and which the Department has not enforced for more than a year and a half, and restores the regulatory text that was in effect before April 29, 2024.
For most institutions, the obligations they have been operating under do not change. The pre-2024 regulations have governed since the 2024 amendments were vacated. What changes is the Code of Federal Regulations itself, and with it the text against which a reviewer, an auditor, or opposing counsel will read an institution's policy.
What the rule does
The rule revises 23 sections of 34 CFR Part 106, including the definitions in section 106.2, the coordinator and notice provisions in section 106.8, and the response and grievance process provisions in sections 106.44 and 106.45. The Department issued it without notice and comment. It relied on the exemption for rules relating to grants, benefits, or contracts, and on a good cause finding that comment was unnecessary because the rule only removes vacated text and restores the operative regulations.
What did not come back
The more useful reading of the rule is a list of what the Department chose not to restore, or chose to remove.
Section 106.10 is removed and not replaced. That section, added by the 2024 amendments, defined the scope of sex discrimination under the regulations.
Appendix A is not reinstated. The Department described it as containing no substantive information and cross-referencing provisions that no longer exist.
Sections 106.3(c) and (d), the original self-evaluation and recordkeeping requirements, are not reinstated. The Department noted that the deadline passed about 45 years ago and that restoring the text could suggest recipients must repeat the process.
Section 106.41(d), the adjustment period for athletics, is not reinstated for the same reason. It expired more than four decades ago.
One sentence of section 106.45(b)(6)(i) is omitted. It is the sentence that barred a decision-maker from relying on any statement of a party or witness who did not submit to cross-examination at a live hearing, together with its proviso against drawing an inference from that absence. A federal court vacated that provision as arbitrary and capricious in Victim Rights Law Center v. Cardona. Because the proviso depended on the first clause, the Department omitted the entire sentence rather than restore half of it.
Why the hearing sentence matters most
The other omissions are housekeeping. The hearing sentence changes how a postsecondary decision-maker may treat evidence. The live hearing requirement for postsecondary institutions remains in the restored text. The rule that excluded untested statements does not.
Many postsecondary policies still carry the exclusion language, copied from the regulatory text in 2020 and never revisited. That language now describes a rule that is not in the regulations. An institution may still choose a procedure that limits reliance on statements not subject to questioning, but that choice should be made deliberately and written as the institution's own standard, not presented as a federal requirement.
A line-by-line check
Institutions should read their current Title IX materials against the restored text with five questions in mind.
First, does any policy cite section 106.10, or define sex discrimination using language drawn from it? Those citations now point to nothing. State law may impose broader protections, and those obligations are unaffected by this rule, but they should be cited to their own source.
Second, do postsecondary hearing procedures still contain the exclusion language from section 106.45(b)(6)(i)? If so, decide whether to remove it or keep a version of it as an institutional standard.
Third, do any handbooks, templates, or training materials still describe procedures built on the 2024 structure? Those should have been retired when the 2024 amendments were vacated. Any that survive now conflict with the text in the Code of Federal Regulations.
Fourth, do websites, notices of nondiscrimination, and coordinator pages cite the 2024 rule by name or date? Update the citations.
Fifth, do any internal documents reference Appendix A or treat the section 106.3 self-evaluation as a current obligation? These are minor, but they are the kind of error that tells a reader the document has not been maintained.
The rule itself creates few new obligations. The work it creates is editorial, and it is best done before someone else compares the documents.