Two Bills, Not One: What's Actually Pending in the New Jersey Assembly on Weight Discrimination

Two bills, not one, are sitting in the New Jersey Assembly Judiciary Committee with no floor vote scheduled on either. S1631, which would add height and weight to the protected categories under the state's Law Against Discrimination, passed the Senate on February 24, 2026, and was referred to Judiciary the same day. A4563, an Assembly bill making the identical amendment, was introduced on March 10, 2026, and referred to the same committee that day. Neither bill's status — checked against the Legislature's own bill pages and, independently, against LegiScan's and FastDemocracy's tracking — shows any committee action since.

Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A4563 is sponsored by Assemblywoman Rosaura "Rosy" Bagolie and Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, with Assemblywoman Shama Haider as a co-sponsor. Its text amends the same three statutes S1631 does — P.L.1945, c.169; P.L.1954, c.198; and P.L.1992, c.146 — to add "or height or weight" to the Law Against Discrimination's list of protected categories, with the same bona fide occupational qualification and safety exceptions S1631 carries. It is, substantively, S1631's Assembly companion. This publication's earlier report on the states where these bills have gone furthest, "Weight Discrimination Bills Keep Passing One Chamber and Dying in the Other," did not mention it; that piece now carries an update note saying so.

Photo by Niagara, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A referral-date conflict had sat unresolved in this newsroom's internal review since August 18: secondary sources gave S1631 a referral date of March 10, 2026, against the published date of February 24. The New Jersey Legislature's own Legislative Digest for February 24 settles it — the same daily digest that records the Senate's third-reading vote also logs, under bills the Assembly received from the Senate that day, "S1631 ... REF AJU." February 24 is correct. March 10 is not a referral date for S1631 at all; it is A4563's own introduction date, printed on that bill's own cover page. The two bills, filed six weeks apart on the same subject, appear to have been conflated somewhere downstream of the Legislature's own records.

A separate figure has circulated since the vote. This publication's earlier report on S1631 alone, "New Jersey Senate Passes Bill to Ban Height and Weight Discrimination," gives the tally as 24 to 14, with two senators not voting. The New Jersey Legislative Senate Democrats announced a different count the same day.

Its own release, "Zwicker, McKnight Bill to Address Height & Weight Discrimination Passes Senate," published February 24, 2026, put it this way: "The bill was passed in a 23-14 vote."