Texas Age Verification Law (HB 1181): What It Requires of You

The statute, the courtroom history, and the part of it that touches your ID.

State of Surveillance

TL;DR: Texas's HB 1181 is the age-check law the Supreme Court upheld in June 2025, and Texas has been enforcing it since a federal appeals court lifted the first block. A commercial site where more than one-third of the material is "sexual material harmful to minors" must verify that every visitor is 18 or older before it shows the site [1]. The statute allows three methods: digital identification, a commercial age verification system that reads government-issued ID, or a commercial age verification system built on public or private transactional data [1]. Neither the site nor the company running the check may keep any identifying information about you [1]. The attorney general has sued Aylo Global, the company that runs Pornhub, along with Hammy Media and Multi Media [3][5]. Pornhub disabled itself in Texas instead of complying [7]. Chaturbate's operator settled and agreed to run an age verification service [6]. The Supreme Court affirmed the law on June 27, 2025 by a 6-3 vote [9]. What no ruling has settled is what happens to the document you upload.

What the Statute Actually Requires

HB 1181 added Chapter 129B to the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, a chapter titled "LIABILITY FOR ALLOWING MINORS TO ACCESS PORNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL" [1]. The trigger is a content threshold, not a topic. A commercial entity that "knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an Internet website, including a social media platform, more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must "use reasonable age verification methods" to confirm that the visitor is "18 years of age or older" [1].

The phrase "sexual material harmful to minors" does a lot of work. It is defined in the statute using an adjusted obscenity standard, the kind of test the Supreme Court has long allowed states to use for material that is obscene for children but not for adults [10]. In plain terms, the law reaches the category of content that is protected for adults and restricted for minors.

Timing, for the record: the House passed the bill on May 9, 2023, the Senate passed it with amendments on May 19, 2023, the House concurred in the Senate amendments on May 25, 2023, and the governor signed it on June 12, 2023 [1][2]. It took effect on September 1, 2023 [1]. Pornography distributors sued in 2023 to stop the law [7].

The Three Ways a Site Can Check Your Age

This is the part that matters if you are the one holding the phone. Section 129B.003 says a covered site, or the third party performing the check for it, must require an individual to do one of two things, with a choice inside the second [1]:

  • Provide digital identification. The statute defines this as "information stored on a digital network that may be accessed by a commercial entity and that serves as proof of the identity of an individual" [1].
  • Comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies age using either government-issued identification, or "a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual" [1].

The statute defines transactional data as a record of an exchange, agreement or transfer between an individual, a company or a third party, used to satisfy a request or event, and it says the term "includes records from mortgage, education, and employment entities" [1]. That is the route where your age is inferred from what you bought, borrowed, studied or where you work, rather than from a document you hold.

Two things the statute does not do. It does not apply to a "bona fide news or public interest broadcast, website video, report, or event", and it may not be read as affecting the rights of a news-gathering organization [1]. It also shields the pipes: an internet service provider, a search engine or a cloud service provider cannot be held to have broken the chapter "solely for providing access or connection to or from a website" [1]. The liability sits with the site that publishes the material, not with the infrastructure that delivers it.

What the Site Is Not Allowed to Keep

Section 129B.002(b) is the part privacy advocates care about most, and it is short: a commercial entity that performs the age verification, "or a third party that performs the age verification", "may not retain any identifying information of the individual" [1]. There is no duty to minimize and no 30-day deletion window in the text. The only line the statute draws is a prohibition, and the price for breaking it is written into the same chapter: "$10,000 per instance when the entity retains identifying information" [1].

Read that as a prohibition with a price tag, not as a security guarantee. The statute does not require anyone to check whether the age-check company deleted the image of your face after it finished looking at it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is blunter about the method: "every age-verification system is, at its core, a surveillance system", and nothing on the market is simultaneously "entirely privacy-protective, fully accurate, and that guarantees complete coverage of the population" [11].

EFF's specific complaint is about how the check gets done. The commonest approach it describes is "uploading a photo of your government ID along with a “live” selfie or video", a method it calls "far more invasive than an in-person ID check" [11]. It also names the exclusion problem: ID-based systems leave out people who have no ID or whose appearance does not match their current documents, and facial-recognition systems "commonly misjudge age based on skin tone, gender, and disability" [11].

The Health Warnings, and the Part of the Law That Was Struck Down

Section 129B.004 requires a covered site to display, on its landing page and on every advertisement for the site, in "14-point font or larger", three notices each headed "TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING" [1]. The first reads: "TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function." [1] At the bottom of every page, the same section requires a helpline notice reading "U.S. SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES ADMINISTRATION HELPLINE: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)" [1].

The warnings are not in force. A district court held that the compulsory health warnings violated the First Amendment, and when the Fifth Circuit partially vacated the injunction in March 2024, "it upheld the lower court's injunction against a separate section of the law that would require pornography websites to display a health warning on their landing page and all advertisements" [4]. The Congressional Research Service records that the judgment on the health warnings "was not appealed to the Supreme Court" [10]. The warnings are still written into the statute. The provision that would have forced them onto a screen is the one that lost.

Who Texas Sued, and What Happened to Them

This is the enforcement record, and it is short enough to read in one sitting. It is also the reason the law is more than a threat on paper.

  • Aylo Global Entertainment, February 26, 2024. The attorney general sued the company that runs Pornhub and other large sites, alleging that it "immediately presents minors who access their websites with pornographic content" instead of installing age verification, and sought an injunction and "potentially millions of dollars in civil penalties" [3].
  • Multi Media and Hammy Media, March 21, 2024. Two more complaints landed on the operators of Chaturbate and xHamster, with the attorney general accusing them of providing "no meaningful screening" [5].
  • Pornhub, by March 2024. Rather than install the checks, Pornhub "opted to shut down its site entirely in Texas" [5]. The attorney general was blunt about it: "PornHub has now disabled its website in Texas. Sites like PornHub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don't want to comply, they should leave Texas." [5]
  • Chaturbate, April 26, 2024. Multi Media settled and agreed to "use an age verification service on the Chaturbate website to ensure compliance" [6]. The attorney general called it "a very positive development" and told the rest of the industry to "willingly choose to do the right thing and abide by the law" [6].

By June 2025 the attorney general was describing the campaign as ongoing: "Attorney General Paxton has already been aggressively enforcing the law, suing Aylo Global Entertainment, the operator of pornography websites including Pornhub" [7]. His position on the statute's reach is on the record too: "Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures. I will continue to enforce the law against any organization that refuses to take the necessary steps to protect minors from explicit materials." [7]

The size of the penalty if a company does not comply: up to "$10,000 per day that the entity operates an Internet website in violation of the age verification requirements of this chapter", "$10,000 per instance" for retaining identifying information, and an additional amount of "not more than $250,000" if a minor reaches the material because of the violation [1]. Enforcement runs through the attorney general, who may sue in a Travis County district court or in the district court where the company has its principal place of business in Texas [1].

How It Survived the Courts

A district court initially enjoined the law. The attorney general appealed and secured a stay, and in November 2023 the Fifth Circuit let Texas enforce HB 1181 [4][5]. In March 2024 that court went further and "partially vacated the original injunction, ruling that the age verification requirements are constitutional", reasoning that "Applying rational-basis review, the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography" [4].

That was not the end of it. The Supreme Court took the case, and on June 27, 2025 affirmed the Fifth Circuit's judgment [9]. The official list of the Court's opinions for the October 2024 term records the decision as 606 U.S. 461, decided 6/27/25 [8]. It was 6-3, with Justice Thomas writing for the majority, and Justice Kagan dissenting alongside Justices Sotomayor and Jackson [9]. The holding, as SCOTUSblog records it: "A Texas law requiring certain commercial websites publishing sexually explicit content that is obscene to minors to verify that visitors are 18 or older only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults and survives intermediate scrutiny under the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause." [9]

The switch from rational-basis review to intermediate scrutiny is the whole ballgame. The Congressional Research Service notes that applying intermediate scrutiny, the Court held the law "readily satisfie[d]" the test, that the statute "undoubtedly" advanced the important, "even 'compelling'" government interest in "shielding children from sexual content", and that it was "sufficiently tailored" because states "commonly" required age verification for "in-person access to sexual materials" [10].

One limit worth knowing, because it is where the next fights are. The Court "found it unnecessary to decide" whether Texas's law requires covered sites to age-gate access to content other than sexual material harmful to minors, "leaving open the possibility that such a requirement might violate the First Amendment in particular applications" [10]. Intermediate scrutiny is a deferential test, but it is still a test, and it is not the standard that applies to a law that gates a whole app store or a whole social network. As the Congressional Research Service puts it, the decision gives "additional legal arguments to state and federal lawmakers seeking to enact or enforce online age-verification requirements" for content "aimed at protecting minors from sexually explicit content" [10].

What You Actually Face if You Are in Texas

Two outcomes, and which one you get depends on the site. Either you hit a wall, because the site decided that complying was more trouble than losing the Texas audience, or you hit a gate that asks you to prove you are 18.

EFF expects the first outcome to be common: "Many sites that cannot reasonably implement age verification measures for reasons such as cost or technical requirements will likely block users living in Texas and other states with similar laws wholesale." [12]

When you do get the gate, the scope is worth understanding. The Texas law "forces adults to submit personal information over the internet to access entire websites that hold some amount of sexual material, not just the pages or portions of sites that specifically contain sexual materials" [12]. The check is on the door, not on the page you wanted. And it is not a formality for everyone: EFF notes that many users "do not have a driver’s license or photo ID to complete the age verification process" [12].

What the courts did not settle is where the data goes while the check runs. The Supreme Court's ruling is a First Amendment holding about speech: it asks how much the law burdens adult access, not what an age-check company may collect or keep. The statute's own answer to the data question is the one sentence in Section 129B.002(b), plus the penalty attached to breaking it [1]. That is the whole of the privacy protection Texas wrote into the law.

What to Do

  • Find out who runs the check before you upload. The statute allows three methods with very different costs, and a site that hands your document to a third-party verifier is a different privacy trade from one that reads a credential you already hold on your phone.
  • Pick the least data option the site offers. Transactional-data verification and a selfie-and-ID upload are not interchangeable. Take the narrower one if you get a choice.
  • Keep a record of what you handed over. Which site, which vendor, which document, which date. If a law is later struck down, that record is the only way to find out what was collected in the meantime.
  • Assume a site will block Texas rather than comply. That is a business decision the statute leaves to the site, and EFF's expectation is that many of them will take it [12].
  • Do not expect the Supreme Court ruling to fix the ID problem. It is a First Amendment decision, and the data question in Texas is still being handled by the statute's retention ban and the penalty attached to it [1].
  • Shrink the rest of the surface. Age verification is one channel. Your browser, your apps and your phone leak more without a single court order involved. See browser privacy and app permissions.

Sources

  1. Texas Legislature Online: 88(R) HB 1181, Enrolled version, Bill Text (new Chapter 129B, Civil Practice and Remedies Code).
  2. Texas Legislature Online: 88(R) History for HB 1181 (bill timeline, including the governor's signature).
  3. Office of the Texas Attorney General: Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues Major Pornography Distributor for Violating Texas Age Verification Laws (press release, February 26, 2024).
  4. Office of the Texas Attorney General: Attorney General Ken Paxton Wins After Pornography Companies Sued Texas Over Age Verification Requirements (press release, March 8, 2024).
  5. Office of the Texas Attorney General: Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues Two More Pornography Companies for Violating Texas Age Verification Law (press release, March 21, 2024).
  6. Office of the Texas Attorney General: Texas Secures Settlement with Operator of Major Pornography Website, Ensuring Compliance with Texas Law (press release, April 26, 2024).
  7. Office of the Texas Attorney General: Attorney General Ken Paxton Successfully Defends Texas Law Requiring Age Verification for Pornography Sites at SCOTUS (press release, June 27, 2025).
  8. Supreme Court of the United States: Opinions of the Court, October Term 2024 (official list with docket numbers, decision dates and United States Reports citations).
  9. SCOTUSblog: Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (23-1122) (case page with the vote, opinion author, dissent lineup and holding).
  10. Congressional Research Service: Supreme Court Upholds State Age-Verification Requirement for Certain Websites, Legal Sidebar LSB11354 (August 28, 2025).
  11. Electronic Frontier Foundation: Age Verification Systems Are Surveillance Systems.
  12. Electronic Frontier Foundation: The Supreme Court's Decision on Age Verification Tramples Free Speech and Undermines Privacy.

Published: November 13, 2026