Interior Renews Class III Compact Paperwork Authority for Tribal Gaming

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has moved to renew the federal paperwork authority behind the Class III tribal-state gaming compact process, and the routine notice contains one of the few public estimates of what compacting actually costs the parties involved. In a notice published at 91 FR 40555 on July 2, 2026, the Office of the Assistant Secretary—Indian Affairs proposed to extend OMB Control Number 1076-0172, the information collection covering compacts and compact amendments submitted to the Secretary of the Interior. The comment period closed August 31.

The collection is the administrative plumbing beneath one of the most consequential approvals in Indian gaming. Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act at 25 U.S.C. 2710(d)(8), the Secretary may approve, disapprove, or allow a compact to take effect by operation of law, and must publish notice of that action in the Federal Register. The regulations governing how those documents are submitted and reviewed sit at 25 CFR Part 293, the rule Interior rewrote earlier this decade to tighten timelines and clarify what the department will and will not accept in a compact.

What the collection actually covers

The abstract is narrow: the information collected consists of the tribal-state compacts and compact amendments entered into by tribes and state governments, which the Secretary then reviews. There is no form number. What tribes and states submit is the negotiated document itself, along with the supporting materials Part 293 requires, and the department's 45-day review clock begins on receipt of a complete submission.

That structure explains why the compacting process has so few procedural choke points and so much substantive discretion. There is no application to score and no queue to stand in. Either the department acts within its window or the compact takes effect by operation of law to the extent it is consistent with IGRA, a pathway that has carried a growing share of recent agreements into force. For tribes and states that have negotiated to the edge of what the department will approve, that default is not a technicality; it is the outcome they are managing toward. Readers new to the mechanics can find the statutory framework laid out in our legal guide to IGRA and Class III gaming.

Forty submissions, 8,000 hours

The burden estimates are the notice's most useful disclosure. Interior estimates 40 respondents and 40 responses per year, at an estimated 200 hours per response, for a total of 8,000 annual burden hours. Respondents are tribes and state governments; the estimated non-hour cost is listed as zero.

Two figures are worth pausing on. The first is the count. Forty compact-related submissions a year, spread across the tribes and states that operate Class III gaming, is a meaningful throughput number for an industry that is often described as static on the compacting front. Most of that volume is amendments rather than wholly new compacts, and the pace has been visible in the Washington amendment wave and in the steady stream of California ratifications. Amendments are also where the substantive policy change happens: device caps, scope of games, responsible gaming provisions and sports wagering authority all arrive through amendment rather than through wholesale renegotiation.

The second is the 200-hour per-response estimate. That figure captures the administrative act of assembling and transmitting a submission. It plainly does not capture the negotiation that produced the document, which routinely runs for years and consumes outside counsel, financial modeling and legislative time on both sides. The gap between the paperwork burden and the real cost of compacting is precisely the gap that tribal negotiators point to when they argue the process, not the filing, is the bottleneck.

The federal estimate values a compact submission at 200 hours. The negotiation that precedes it is frequently measured in years.

Why a routine renewal matters now

Paperwork Reduction Act renewals are ordinarily invisible outside the agencies that file them. This one arrives during a period in which the federal machinery around tribal gaming approvals has been under strain. A vacancy in the chairmanship of the National Indian Gaming Commission has held up categories of action that federal law assigns to the chair alone, including management contract approvals, and the department's own compact and land decisions have drawn litigation on several fronts. Interior has separately been consulting with tribes on the compact process itself, which makes the timing of a quiet extension request worth noting.

Against that backdrop, the durability of the compact submission channel matters. The collection authority is what allows Interior to receive and act on compacts at all; letting it lapse would create an administrative problem on top of the substantive ones. Interior classified the action as an extension of a currently approved collection, with no proposed change to the burden estimates, which signals the department does not expect the volume or the format of compact submissions to shift in the near term.

Comments submitted to docket BIA-2022-0005 will be part of the public record. For tribal gaming departments, the more consequential question raised by the notice is not whether the collection is renewed, which it almost certainly will be, but whether the department's stated assumptions about volume hold as compact expirations, sports betting amendments and revenue-sharing renegotiations continue to accumulate on the calendar.