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The National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md.Credit Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — An appeals court ruled on Friday that the National Security Agency may continue to collect the phone records of millions of Americans, at least until a new law banning the practice goes into effect in November.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia lifted an injunction, which had been issued by a 2013 ruling against the N.S.A. program by a lower court but was not in effect, helping clear some of the legal thicket that has grown up around the agency’s so-called bulk phone records collection. The ruling came even though Congress passed a law in June to end the program.

Legal challenges to the phone data program — which began in secret under the Patriot Act and then was disclosed by leaks from the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden — were underway in the courts long before Congress acted to end it. They have continued despite the new law, which replaces the agency’s bulk collection with a process in which the major phone companies will hold the data and the agency will have to seek court orders to obtain it.

The Obama administration says the law allows the agency to continue the phone program for 180 days to give it time to change to the new process, but a separate lawsuit is challenging that. The transition period will end Nov. 29, so any further legal challenges to the program will have only a temporary effect.

Friday’s ruling has no immediate consequences for the N.S.A., since the injunction imposed by the lower court was not in effect. The Obama administration had appealed the lower court’s ruling to the court of appeals.

The bulk collection of phone records was started by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as part of the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping and domestic spying program. The Obama administration expanded the agency’s domestic surveillance as the government capitalized on the growth of social media and other forms of digital information that could be collected in order to track people.

The Obama administration interpreted the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which authorized the collection of business records, as also authorizing the clandestine collection of the phone calling records of millions of Americans. The administration did not make public the bulk collection of data until after Mr. Snowden disclosed it by leaking N.S.A. documents.

Before Mr. Snowden’s actions, the White House imposed intense secrecy on the program. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and one of the members of Congress who had been briefed about it, said that if members of the general public knew what he did, they would be shocked. He warned that the Obama administration was using “secret law,” and that there were two versions of the Patriot Act — the one the public had been told about, and a secret one.

Because the information was classified, however, Mr. Wyden would not say publicly what concerned him. Only after Mr. Snowden revealed the existence of the bulk collection program in 2013 did Mr. Wyden admit that he had been referring to the bulk data collection program.

Lawsuits against the program followed Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, joining a cluster of earlier lawsuits that had been filed against the N.S.A.’s domestic spying operations after The New York Times’s disclosure of the agency’s warrantless wiretapping program in 2005. Many of these lawsuits have ultimately failed on the grounds of a lack of standing by those who have brought the suits, meaning that the people suing the N.S.A. and the government could not prove they had been spied on or otherwise victimized by the N.S.A.

In some of the lawsuits, that issue of standing has blocked broader and more significant court rulings on whether the agency’s domestic spying is constitutional.

Standing was also an issue at the heart of Friday’s ruling. The appeals court said that the injunction against the bulk phone records program imposed by the lower court had to be lifted, arguing that the plaintiff could not prove his phone records had been collected and thus lacked standing, and sending the case back to the lower court for further review.