North Dakota Age Verification Law: NDCC 51-07-32 Explained

North Dakota's age-verification law, codified at North Dakota Century Code §51-07-32, took effect August 1, 2025 and requires commercial websites where a substantial share of content is harmful to minors to verify a visitor's age. It was created by Senate Bill 2380 in the 2025 session and is enforced entirely through private lawsuits.

What NDCC 51-07-32 Requires

North Dakota Century Code §51-07-32 defines "sexual material harmful to a minor" using a standard obscenity-adjacent test: content that appeals to a prurient interest, is patently offensive, and lacks serious value for minors. A commercial entity whose website content is more than one-third such material must perform reasonable age verification before granting access, using either a digitized identification check or a commercial age-verification system relying on a government-issued ID or commercially reasonable transactional data.

The statute bars retention of identifying information collected during the verification process and exempts bona fide news or news-gathering organizations from its requirements. It took effect August 1, 2025, after passing the North Dakota legislature unanimously, 90-0 in the House and 47-0 in the Senate.

Enforcement: A Private Right of Action

North Dakota's law is enforced through a civil action brought by a parent, guardian, or an affected individual, not by the state's Attorney General. Available remedies include an injunction, compensatory and exemplary damages, and attorney's fees. This places North Dakota's structure in the same private-right-of-action category as Kentucky's law and Nebraska's LB 1092, rather than the Attorney General-enforceable model used in states such as Oklahoma.

The Enacting Bill: Senate Bill 2380

Section 51-07-32 was created by Senate Bill 2380, passed in the 2025 regular session of the Sixty-ninth Legislative Assembly. The enrolled bill is titled an Act "to create and enact a new section to chapter 51-07 of the North Dakota Century Code, relating to a commercial entity's liability for publishing or distributing sexual material harmful to a minor; to provide a penalty; and to provide for application." Section 1 of that bill is the text now codified at §51-07-32.

SB 2380 is the source of §51-07-32 rather than a second statute. North Dakota has a single age-verification law.

The Governor signed the bill on April 24, 2025, and it was filed with the Secretary of State on April 25, 2025. Because the Act carries no emergency clause and names no later date, it took effect August 1, 2025 under Article IV, Section 13 of the North Dakota Constitution, which provides that a law "takes effect on August first after its filing with the secretary of state" absent a two-thirds emergency declaration.

Who the Statute Does Not Reach

Section 51-07-32 imposes no duty on device manufacturers, operating systems, or app stores, and it requires no device-level age signal. Subsection 8 runs the other way: an "internet service provider or its affiliates or subsidiaries, a search engine, a cloud service provider, or an application store, may not be held to have violated this section solely for providing access or connection to or from a website" or other content the provider did not create and does not control. Liability under the statute falls on the commercial entity that publishes or distributes the material.

Readers looking for the states that regulate age signals at the device or app-store level should see App Store Age Verification Laws. North Dakota is not among them.

Litigation Status

No lawsuit against North Dakota Century Code §51-07-32 was found in this research. Local news coverage from around the law's effective date described it as modeled on Utah's earlier law and joining roughly 19 other states with similar statutes, without mentioning any legal challenge. That the law has now been in effect for more than a year without a reported injunction is itself a mild corroborating signal, though it is not a substitute for an actual docket search.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• Kentucky Age Verification Law
• Nebraska Age Verification Law
• App Store Age Verification Laws

---

Last updated: 2026-09-02.