The Code of Federal Regulations Defines 'Person' 191 Different Ways

We pulled the full text of the Code of Federal Regulations, all 50 titles and roughly 227,600 sections, and searched it for every section whose heading marks it as a definitions section. There are about 8,700 of them, or 1 in every 27 sections in the CFR. Within those sections, we extracted every standalone instance of the construction "Person means," excluding compound terms like "authorized person" and "handicapped person."

After deduplicating by normalized text, 191 distinct definitions of "person" remain.

The spectrum

The shortest definitions are three words. 12 CFR § 330.1 (FDIC deposit insurance) defines "natural person" as "a human being." 40 CFR § 97.902 (EPA emissions trading) starts the same way, then contrasts a natural person with a legal person, which may be a private or public organization. The phrase "natural person means a human being" appears only twice in the CFR. Only one of those definitions stops there.

The longest run past 300 characters and enumerate every organizational form the drafters could think of: individuals, corporations, partnerships, joint ventures, associations, joint stock companies, trusts, unincorporated organizations, governments, agencies, political subdivisions, Indian tribes, and "any other entity."

Most fall somewhere between. "Somewhere between" covers a lot of ground.

Governments, tribes, and foreign entities

The practical question across the CFR is what counts as a person for purposes of a given regulation. Governments, tribes, and foreign entities are the recurring fault lines, and the answer changes from title to title.

Under 15 CFR § 1400.2 (public safety broadband), a "person" can only be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. Under 2 CFR § 418.105, a "person" includes state and local governments. Under 7 CFR § 1467.3 (wetland conservation), a "person" includes Indian tribes but explicitly excludes governments.

Some definitions are narrower still. 4 CFR § 28.3 defines "person" as "an employee, an applicant for employment, a former employee, a labor organization or the GAO." The Government Accountability Office itself is a "person" under its own personnel appeals regulations.

5 CFR § 581.102 defines "private person" by whether the entity lacks sovereign or other special immunity that would keep it from being subject to legal process. Under that regulation, you are a "private person" only if legal process can reach you.

Copy-paste

Many of the 191 definitions are not the result of independent drafting. The most common single definition of "person" appears word-for-word in 12 different sections across transportation regulations. Another template appears 11 times across international trade rules. A third appears 7 times across civil rights provisions.

The result is dozens of functionally similar but textually distinct definitions scattered across titles.

Compound terms

Beyond the 191 standalone definitions, the CFR separately defines hundreds of compound "person" terms. "Handicapped person" alone has 103 definitions across different sections. "Authorized person" has 15. "Foreign person" has 13. "Qualified person" and "competent person" each have 11.

8,700 definitions sections

Roughly 1 in 27 CFR sections exists solely to define terms. Some titles are far more definitions-heavy than others:

At the bottom, Title 27 (Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms) has 3,951 sections and only 15 definitions sections, a density of 0.4%.

The single longest definitions section in the entire CFR is 26 CFR § 1.469-4T, an IRS regulation titled "Definition of activity (temporary)." It runs 202,582 characters, roughly 50 pages under a single definitions heading. Six of the ten longest definitions sections in the CFR are IRS regulations.

Title 40 (Protection of Environment) leads by raw count, with 1,205 definitions sections, about 14% of all definitions sections in the entire CFR.

Methodology

We built a local copy of the full Code of Federal Regulations from eCFR XML data (dated May 14, 2026). We searched section headings across all 50 titles for "definition" and related terms ("meaning of," "glossary," "terminology," "words and phrases," "terms used"). Heading variants other than "definition" account for roughly 2.5% of definitions sections.

Within those sections, we searched for standalone instances of "Person means" using a regex that requires the phrase to be preceded by a sentence boundary, newline, or "the term." This filters out compound terms like "handicapped person means" and "authorized person means," which inflated the initial count by roughly 3x before correction. That yielded 268 standalone definitions, which deduplicate by normalized text to 191 unique definitions. Definitions that differ only by punctuation or whitespace are counted as the same.

The 191 figure is a lower bound. The true total of standalone definitions, including sections with non-standard headings, is closer to 280 before deduplication.

Every regulation cited in this article links to its eCFR page so readers can verify the text directly.