Directive

The one-sentence answer

A directive is an instruction issued by the Department of Developmental Services to regional centers — and in the Self-Determination Program, directives are where the operative rules actually live, because the program has no adopted regulations.

What this means for you

If you want to know the current rule, you read the directives. That is an unusual situation and it matters. Most programs have regulations you can look up in one place. Self-Determination has a statute (WIC 4685.8) and then a stream of DDS directives that fill in how it works — and they change.

Not everything DDS issues is binding, and the difference is visible in the document number. DDS labels them by class:

Prefix	What it is	Binding?
D-	Directive	Yes — mandatory
G-	Guidance	No — "encouraged but not mandated"
P-	Program guidelines	Varies
C-	Correspondence	No — informational

This distinction is worth knowing when someone tells you a rule. If a regional center or a provider says something is required, the document class tells you whether it actually is. A G- document is not a requirement, however firmly it is described.

And they are not filed where you would expect. DDS has an SDP program-directives page, but directives that govern Self-Determination also appear under other subject series — Case Management, Rates, Legislation, Regional Center Operations. One of the most significant recent SDP directives is filed under Case Management. The complete index, organized by year, is at https://www.dds.ca.gov/general/regional-center-directives/.

Directives are addressed to regional centers, not to you — they say "Regional Center Executive Directors" at the top. But they are public, and they are frequently the only place a rule affecting you is written down.

For the detail-oriented

DDS's authority to issue instructions for the Self-Determination Program comes from WIC 4685.8(p)(2), which is cited in the SDP directives themselves.

There are no adopted regulations for the Self-Determination Program. Directives are therefore the operative rules, which makes tracking them more important here than in programs where a regulation would settle the question.

Not everything on the directives page is a directive

DDS posts four kinds of document together, and they do not carry the same weight. In DDS's own words:

Kind	What it means	Must a regional center follow it?
Directive	"instructions RCs must follow"	Yes
Program Guidelines	"rules RCs must follow for specific programs"	Yes, for that programme
Guidance	"items RCs are encouraged to do or approaches to consider"	No — "not mandated"
Correspondence	"how DDS shares helpful information"	No

This distinction is worth knowing before you quote something at your regional center. A guidance document is DDS suggesting, not requiring. If someone tells you the regional center must do something because "DDS said so", the first question is which of these four it came from.

Reading the reference number

The identifiers look forbidding and are actually simple. D-2026-Rates-001 breaks down as:

• D — the kind. D for Directive, G for Guidance, P for Program Guidelines
• 2026 — the year it was issued
• Rates — the subject category
• 001 — the sequence within that year and category

So G-2026-Regional Center Operations-002 is the second Guidance document of 2026 on regional centre operations — and, per the table above, is not something a regional centre is obliged to follow.

Many are published in Spanish and other languages, listed beside the English version on the same row.

Scale, so you know what you are looking at

The 2026 list alone runs to over a hundred documents, with more than four hundred from 2025 and earlier. Nobody expects a family to track this. It is the reason this site keeps a changelog of the ones that actually change something for a participant.

Still to come: whether DDS offers a notification or subscription list a family could join, what the REV suffix means when a document is reissued, and what happens when a directive and the statute appear to conflict.