Arkansas Age Verification Law: Act 612 Requirements Explained

Arkansas's age-verification law for adult content, Act 612 of 2023, was approved on April 11, 2023 and carries no emergency clause, so it took effect under Arkansas's default rule for acts passed in that regular session. It requires a reasonable age-verification method before a covered website can be accessed, and it is legally distinct from Arkansas's Social Media Safety Act, which a federal court has since struck down.

What Arkansas's Age-Verification Law Requires

Act 612 of 2023, also known as Senate Bill 66, created the Protection of Minors from Distribution of Harmful Material Act, codified at Arkansas Code Annotated sections 4-88-1301 through 4-88-1305. Section 4-88-1304 requires a commercial entity to use a reasonable age-verification method before allowing access to a website that contains a substantial portion of material harmful to minors. The Act lists a digitized identification card, government-issued identification, and any commercially reasonable method meeting Identity Assurance Level 2 as qualifying methods.

Section 4-88-1303 defines a substantial portion as more than thirty-three and thirty-three hundredths percent (33.33%) of the total material on a website. The test is therefore more than 33.33 percent, not 33.33 percent or more, and a site sitting exactly at the threshold is not covered.

One numbering point trips up almost every secondary summary of this law. The bill text of Act 612 wrote its own sections as 4-88-1101 through 4-88-1105, and many write-ups still cite section 4-88-1101. That slot was reassigned during codification: the Code Revision Commission placed the Act at Subchapter 13, so the operative citations today are 4-88-1301 through 4-88-1305. Section 4-88-1101 in the current Arkansas Code is the title section of an unrelated net-metering statute, so a reader who looks up 4-88-1101 will find an electric-utility billing law rather than an age-verification requirement.

The Act was approved on April 11, 2023 and contains no emergency clause and no effective-date section, so it took effect under Arkansas's default rule for acts passed in the 2023 regular session. That made Arkansas one of the earlier states to enact this model, well before the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld a similar Texas law.

Two Separate Arkansas Laws, Easy to Confuse

Arkansas has two different laws that touch age and online content, and conflating them is the most common reporting error for this state. Act 612 is the adult-content age-verification law described on this page; it has not been challenged in court. Arkansas's Social Media Safety Act, Act 689 (Senate Bill 396) and a related Act 901, is a different statute that requires age verification and parental consent to create a social media account generally, not just to view adult material. A federal judge struck that law down on First Amendment grounds in NetChoice v. Griffin.

That ruling addresses the social-media law's broader restrictions on speech; it has no bearing on Act 612's narrower, adult-content-specific requirement, which remains in force. A reader who sees Arkansas described as having its age-verification law struck down is very likely seeing a report about the social-media law, not this one.

What Act 612 Does and Does Not Do

Act 612 requires a covered site to verify a visitor's age before granting access to material harmful to minors. It does not make that material illegal to possess or view once a visitor is verified as an adult, and it does not require a site to stop serving Arkansas visitors altogether. The Act also bars a commercial entity or its vendor from retaining a visitor's identifying information after access has been granted, and it carves out news and public-interest content, news-gathering organizations, cloud service providers, and internet service providers acting only as conduits.

A platform faced with the compliance requirement generally has two choices: build or license an age-verification system, or decline to serve visitors it cannot easily verify. Which approach any specific site has taken with respect to Arkansas was not independently confirmed in this research, but neither choice is compelled by the statute itself, and describing Act 612 as a ban on the underlying content would misstate what it actually requires.

Enforcement

Act 612 is enforced by private lawsuit rather than by a state agency. The enrolled Act's title states that it provides for individual rights of action and allows for attorney's fees and court costs, and section 4-88-1302(b) records the General Assembly's intent to provide a civil remedy for damages against commercial entities that distribute material harmful to minors.

Section 4-88-1305(b) makes a commercial entity that violates the subchapter liable to an individual for damages resulting from a minor accessing the material, including court costs and reasonable attorney's fees as ordered by the court. Section 4-88-1305(c) creates a parallel claim against an entity that knowingly retained a visitor's identifying information after granting access.

The Act contains no Attorney General enforcement provision and sets no civil-penalty schedule or fine ceiling. The remedy is a damages award to an individual plaintiff, plus costs and fees, determined by a court. That is a meaningful contrast with Arkansas's separate Social Media Safety Act, which expressly routed enforcement through the state's deceptive-trade-practices machinery. This research did not locate a reported lawsuit specific to Act 612.

Where Arkansas's Law Fits Nationally

Act 612 predates the Supreme Court's June 27, 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U.S. ___ (2025), by roughly two years, but it follows the same basic model that decision later upheld: a commercial entity that publishes material harmful to minors online must use reasonable age verification, and that requirement survives intermediate scrutiny rather than a stricter standard. Arkansas's law was on the books for almost two years before the constitutional question was nationally settled, without a reported challenge, which is worth noting given how aggressively Arkansas's separate social-media law was litigated over roughly the same period.

Verified against the enrolled text of Act 612 of 2023 (Senate Bill 66) on the Arkansas General Assembly's official site, together with a compliance tracker and NetChoice's own litigation tracker, current as of 2026-09-02. Two points are worth stating plainly. First, the Act's codified section numbers, 4-88-1301 through 4-88-1305, differ from the 4-88-1101 through 4-88-1105 numbering that appears in the bill text, because the Act was placed at Subchapter 13 during codification; section 4-88-1101 in the current Code belongs to an unrelated net-metering statute. Second, the enrolled Act contains no emergency clause and no effective-date section, so it took effect under Arkansas's default post-session rule. Secondary sources report the resulting date variously as July 31 and August 1, 2023; because the Act's own text sets no date, this page does not print a specific effective date rather than repeat an unverified one.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• Texas Age Verification Law
• Georgia Age Verification Law
• Mississippi Age Verification Law

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Last updated: 2026-09-02.