The paper deals with the problem of comprehending texts of current official documents. As part of a sociolinguistic survey, participants (speakers of modern Russian, 399 people) answered a series of questions, mainly aimed at testing comprehension, on the texts of three local acts: "Informed Consent for Medical Intervention", "Rules of Conduct in the Museum-Reserve", and "Rules of Admission to University". The article discusses the results of quantitative processing of the obtained data, shows the dependence of the respondents' response strategies and the level of their language competence in relation to the texts of official documents on their social parameters (age, education level, gender), type of employment and experience in working with documents.