Does federal law ban hair discrimination?

Not by name. Title VII bans discrimination because of race, but the Eleventh Circuit held in 2016 that a dreadlock ban applied without regard to race is not covered because a hairstyle is not an immutable trait. A federal CROWN Act bill has been introduced in Congress since 2019 and has not become law.

What does a CROWN Act actually prohibit?

It amends a state's existing anti-discrimination statute to define race, or discrimination because of race, as including hair texture and protective hairstyles such as braids, locks, twists, and afros. It does not create a new category; it closes a specific loophole in an existing one.

How many states have passed a CROWN Act?

At least 29 as of August 29, 2026, by a count built from GovDocs's tracker (27 states, updated July 2025) plus Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, which enacted their versions later in 2025. Other trackers report 30, likely counting Missouri's narrower school-only law or a different cutoff date.

Is a workplace grooming policy automatically legal if it isn't about hair texture?

In states without a CROWN Act, a facially race-neutral grooming policy, such as a ban on a specific hairstyle rather than a texture, has generally survived Title VII challenges since Rogers v. American Airlines in 1981. State and local CROWN Acts change that analysis by defining the hairstyle itself as part of race.

The CROWN Act and what a hair policy costs

No federal statute bans hair discrimination by name. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination because of race, and for decades that was read not to reach a hairstyle at all. The CROWN Act, an acronym for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, is the answer states built once it became clear Congress would not close that gap on its own. This describes what the law says as of August 29, 2026. It is not legal advice.

The gap Title VII left open

The line was drawn early, and it was drawn about hair length, not race. In Willingham v. Macon Telegraph Publishing Co., the Fifth Circuit sitting en banc upheld a newspaper’s policy requiring short hair on men but not on women. Rehearing the case in 1975, the court reasoned that regulating hair length by sex was not discriminatory because it did not keep either sex out of the job and did not put one sex at a disadvantage relative to the other. The case was about sex, not race, but the underlying move, treating a grooming standard as outside the statute because a person could simply change their hair, is the one every later hair case had to argue around.

Rogers v. American Airlines extended that reasoning to race directly. Renee Rogers, a Black gate agent, was told to cover her all-braided hairstyle with a headpiece under a policy that barred the style outright. The Southern District of New York ruled against her in 1981, treating an all-braided style as a hairstyle a person chooses rather than a trait a person is born with, and therefore not the kind of characteristic Title VII was written to protect. The court noted that the airline’s ban applied without regard to race on its face, and it pointed out that the style had recently been worn by a white actress in a film, evidence, in the court’s view, that the style was not exclusively or predominantly associated with one race.

Thirty-five years later, an employer used the same distinction to withdraw a job offer over dreadlocks. Chastity Jones interviewed for a customer-service job at Catastrophe Management Solutions, in a business suit, wearing short dreadlocks. She was hired, then told during onboarding that the company could not keep her on unless she cut them; a manager said dreadlocks “tend to get messy.” The EEOC sued on her behalf, arguing the policy was race discrimination. In 2016 the Eleventh Circuit held that banning dreadlocks under a grooming policy that applies to every race equally does not, on its own, amount to intentional race discrimination, because the EEOC’s complaint had not alleged that dreadlocks are an immutable characteristic of Black people, something the court defined as a trait “not subject or susceptible to change.” CMS’s policy, the court wrote, applied “with equal force to men and women (and hairstyles) of all races.” The Eleventh Circuit denied a petition to rehear the case en banc in December 2017. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case to the Supreme Court on Jones’s behalf, and the Court denied certiorari in May 2018, leaving the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling as the last word any court has given the question. It is still good law in the states that circuit covers: Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

What a CROWN Act actually changes

A CROWN Act does not create a new protected category. It amends the existing definition of race inside a state’s civil rights statute. Virginia’s version, in force since July 1, 2020, reads: “The terms ‘because of race’ or ‘on the basis of race’ or terms of similar import when used in reference to discrimination in the Code and acts of the General Assembly include because of or on the basis of traits historically associated with race, including hair texture, hair type, and protective hairstyles such as braids, locks, and twists.” That single clause does all the work. Once hair texture and protective hairstyles are written into what “race” means under the statute, the reasoning in Rogers and Catastrophe Management Solutions, that a hairstyle is a choice and therefore outside race discrimination law, no longer applies in that state, because the legislature has said otherwise. California passed the first version in 2019; New York and New Jersey followed the same year.

How many states, checked today

As of August 29, 2026, at least 29 states have enacted a CROWN Act or an equivalent statute. That figure is built from GovDocs’s employer-compliance tracker, last updated July 2025, which counted 27 states, two of them, Arizona and Kentucky, protected only by a governor’s executive order rather than a statute passed by the legislature. Two more states enacted statutes after that count: Rhode Island, signed by Governor Dan McKee on July 2, 2025, and Pennsylvania, signed by Governor Josh Shapiro on November 25, 2025, with an effective date of January 24, 2026. The Economic Policy Institute puts the national total at 30 states in a piece published under that headline; the discrepancy most likely comes from Missouri’s 2024 law, which extends hair protections to students in schools but not to private employment, and from differing cutoff dates between trackers rather than any disagreement about which states have acted. No tracker consulted for this piece disputes the states named above; the disagreement is only in what gets counted as “enacted.” A dozen or more states, by GovDocs’s account, have CROWN Act bills currently filed or pre-filed, including Georgia, Missouri’s broader employment version, and North Dakota, none of them law yet.

By name, the states are California, New York, and New Jersey (2019); Virginia, Colorado, Washington, and Maryland (2020); Connecticut, New Mexico, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, and Illinois (2021); Maine, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alaska, Delaware, and Massachusetts (2022); Minnesota and Texas (2023); Kentucky by statute and by an earlier executive order, and Arizona by executive order (2024); Vermont, effective July 1, 2024; and Rhode Island and Pennsylvania (2025), the two most recent additions. That list runs from a Democratic legislature in Sacramento to a Republican one in Austin, which is the detail worth sitting with: hair discrimination is one of the few employment questions that has not sorted neatly along party lines once it reaches a state capitol.

The federal bill that has not passed

Congress has tried repeatedly. The House passed a federal CROWN Act, H.R. 2116, by a vote of 235 to 189 on March 18, 2022; the bill received no Senate vote before that Congress ended, and the next Congress did not bring it back for a floor vote at all. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman and Senator Cory Booker reintroduced it on February 26, 2025, as H.R. 1638 and S. 751. Both bills were referred to committee on introduction and, as of this writing, have not advanced past that stage. Absent a federal law, protection depends entirely on whether the state, or in some cases the city, where the workplace sits has passed its own version, which is why the same policy that is unlawful in Richmond can still be enforceable in a state that has not acted.

What this means for a policy on paper

A grooming policy that never mentions race can still function as one, and that is the fact the case law keeps landing on: not what the policy says, but what it reaches for in practice. A company operating in a CROWN Act state cannot write a rule against locks, twists, or afros and rely on the policy’s silence about race to protect it. A company operating only in a state without one is, per Catastrophe Management Solutions, still on defensible ground if the policy applies to every race equally on its face, however that plays out for the person standing in the lobby with a job offer that just became conditional on a haircut.