Louisiana Age Verification Law: Act 440 and LA Wallet Explained

Louisiana was the first state in the nation to enact an adult-content age-verification law, roughly eight months before Texas. Act 440, codified at Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 9:2800.29, has been in effect since January 1, 2023, has never been enjoined, and is the rare state law where a major platform chose to comply rather than block access entirely.

This article covers that law and, separately, Louisiana's App Store Accountability Act, which was delayed a full year to give Texas's parallel litigation time to resolve. It also disambiguates Act 440 from Louisiana's unrelated social media law, Act 456, which is under a permanent injunction and should never be blended with the law described here.

What Louisiana's Age-Verification Law Requires

Act 440, House Bill 142 of the 2022 Regular Session, requires a commercial entity that publishes or distributes material online where at least one-third of the content is harmful to minors to implement age verification before granting access. Accepted methods mirror the approach other states later adopted: a digitized identification card, most often through Louisiana's own LA Wallet app, or a commercial age-verification system relying on a government-issued ID or a commercially reasonable transactional-data method. The law took effect January 1, 2023, codified as Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 9:2800.29.

Two Enforcement Tracks: Private Suits and Attorney General Penalties

Louisiana enforces adult-content age verification on two separate tracks, and a compliance review that reads only Act 440 will see half of the exposure.

The first track is private. Under Section 9:2800.29, the provision Act 440 created, a noncompliant site can be held liable to an individual for damages resulting from a minor's access to the material, including court costs and reasonable attorney fees ordered by the court. Similar liability applies if a verifier knowingly retains identifying information after granting access.

The second track is the state. Act 216 of 2023 added Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 51:2121, which places the same reasonable-age-verification duty on commercial entities whose sites are more than thirty-three and one-third percent material harmful to minors. Under Section 51:2121(A)(2), the Attorney General may investigate a suspected violation and file a civil action in the Nineteenth Judicial District Court for East Baton Rouge Parish, after giving the entity 30 days' notice. Section 51:2121(B)(1) sets the money: a civil penalty of not more than $5,000 for each day of violation, plus an additional civil penalty of up to $10,000 for each violation where the entity knowingly failed to perform age verification, along with the state's investigation costs, expenses, and attorney fees.

Act 440 standing alone created only a private right of action, which is why Louisiana is often described as a state with no public enforcer for this duty. That description has been out of date since 2023.

The Court Challenge That Never Reached the Merits

Act 440 was challenged. In Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. LeBlanc, No. 2:23-cv-02123, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana on June 20, 2023, the Free Speech Coalition, several adult-content companies, and individual plaintiffs sued three Louisiana officials seeking to block Section 9:2800.29.

No court ever ruled on whether the law is constitutional. On October 4, 2023, Judge Susie Morgan granted the state's Rule 12(b)(1) motion and dismissed all three defendants without prejudice for lack of jurisdiction: James LeBlanc, Attorney General Jeff Landry, and Jay Dardenne, Commissioner of the Division of Administration. The plaintiffs appealed to the Fifth Circuit in November 2023 as No. 23-30780, then moved to dismiss their own appeal, which the Fifth Circuit granted on May 3, 2024. The district court stayed and administratively closed the case in March 2024, and the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed it without prejudice on September 29, 2025.

So the practical bottom line still holds: Act 440 has been in continuous effect since January 1, 2023 and has never been enjoined. But that is because the challenge failed on justiciability before it got to the merits, not because nobody contested the law. Louisiana is distinct from Texas, Mississippi, and Utah in how its challenge ended, not in whether one was brought.

The Louisiana Exception: Compliance Instead of a Geo-Block

Most major adult platforms responded to a new state age-verification requirement by blocking that state's traffic entirely. Louisiana is the exception. Pornhub verifies Louisiana visitors through LA Wallet, the state's digital-ID app, rather than blocking the state outright, reportedly the only state where it still operates this way. Pornhub has publicly stated that Louisiana traffic fell by roughly 80 percent after the verification requirement took effect, framing the decline as users migrating elsewhere on the internet rather than simply stopping. That is a useful, sourced data point for what age verification actually changes in practice: it does not eliminate demand, and it does not «ban» anything, but it does measurably change where that demand goes.

A Second, Separate Louisiana Law: the Social Media Statute

Louisiana also enacted Act 456, the Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act, which required social media platforms with five million or more worldwide accounts to verify whether a Louisiana user is under 16 and obtain parental consent for minors. Act 456 sits on a different title of Louisiana's revised statutes than Act 440, and it has had a very different court history: a federal judge permanently enjoined its enforcement against ten named platforms, including Meta, Snap, and YouTube, in a ruling signed December 15, 2025. That injunction applies to Act 456, the social media law, and has no bearing on Act 440, the adult-content law described above.

Louisiana's App Store Accountability Act: Delayed to 2027

Louisiana enacted its own App Store Accountability Act, House Bill 570 of 2025, requiring app stores and developers to verify a user's age, link a minor's account to a parent's account, and obtain verifiable parental consent before certain downloads or in-app purchases. The law's effective date was originally set for July 1, 2026. House Bill 977, signed May 15, 2026, pushed that date back a full year to July 1, 2027, explicitly to let the legislature see how the nearly identical Texas law fares in its ongoing federal court fight. Louisiana's version, unlike Utah's, kept the Attorney General as its sole enforcer and did not add a private right of action.

Verified directly against Louisiana's enrolled Act 440 text, the enrolled text of Section 51:2121 as added by Act 216 of 2023, the federal docket in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. LeBlanc, the Louisiana Legislature's record on House Bill 977, and reporting on the Act 456 injunction, current as of 2026-09-02.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• Texas Age Verification Law
• Utah Age Verification Law
• App Store Age Verification Laws

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Last updated: 2026-09-02.