Tennessee Age Verification Law: Protect Tennessee Minors Act Explained

Tennessee's Protect Tennessee Minors Act requires covered websites to verify a visitor's age before granting access to adult content. It has been enforceable since January 2025, when the Sixth Circuit stayed a district court injunction against it, and the General Assembly amended it later that year while the First Amendment case was still pending.

What Tennessee's Protect Tennessee Minors Act Requires

Senate Bill 1792, the Protect Tennessee Minors Act, was enacted as 2024 Tennessee Public Acts chapter 1021 and is codified at Tennessee Code Annotated Section 39-17-912. It restricts minors' access to adult content online by requiring covered websites to verify a visitor's age before granting access to material of that kind, and it makes a violation of the age-verification and data-retention duties a Class C felony. The law took effect January 1, 2025.

A nearby section, Tennessee Code Annotated Section 39-17-911, is a separate and older statute covering the in-person sale, loan, or exhibition of material harmful to minors. It carries a Class A misdemeanor penalty and contains no website or age-verification provisions, so it is not the source of Tennessee's online age-verification requirement.

The 2025 Amendment to the Act

The General Assembly changed the PTMA in its next session. Public Chapter 405, enacted as Senate Bill 448 and passed on April 21, 2025, amends Section 39-17-912 by deleting subdivision (b)(5) in its entirety. That subdivision was the Act's own long definition of content harmful to minors. The chapter takes effect upon becoming law.

The amendment matters to how the statute is being defended in court. In a July 2025 status report, the State told the federal district court that the PTMA, as recently amended, mirrors the Texas law the Supreme Court upheld under intermediate scrutiny in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.

The Sixth Circuit Stayed an Injunction in January 2025, Not 2026

A First Amendment challenge to the PTMA, Free Speech Coalition, Incorporated, et al. v. Jonathan Thomas Skrmetti, No. 24-6158, reached the Sixth Circuit after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee granted a preliminary injunction on December 30, 2024, one day before the law was to take effect. The State asked the Sixth Circuit for an emergency stay of that injunction, and the court granted it on January 13, 2025, allowing the PTMA to be enforced. Tennessee's own Attorney General's office announced the stay directly.

A stay pending appeal is not the same thing as a final ruling upholding the law. The Sixth Circuit's stay order noted only that its initial review suggested the district court's First Amendment analysis was lacking, which is a likelihood-of-success signal rather than a final holding.

How Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton Reshaped the Tennessee Case

The Sixth Circuit's stay predates the U.S. Supreme Court's June 27, 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, which upheld a Texas age-verification law and held that this category of statute triggers, and survives, intermediate scrutiny rather than the stricter standard the challengers argued for. Paxton was decided while Tennessee's appeal, involving the same lead plaintiff organization and a materially similar law, was pending.

Both courts then moved. In the Sixth Circuit, the attorney general filed a motion on July 9, 2025 asking the court to vacate the district court's injunction and remand for further proceedings; the plaintiffs opposed it on July 22 and the State replied on July 29. In the district court, where the case had been stayed since April 22, 2025 pending Paxton, the parties were ordered to file a status update within ten days of the decision. The State filed one; the plaintiffs filed nothing, and on July 15, 2025 Chief Judge Sheryl H. Lipman ordered them to show cause by July 22 why their claims should not be dismissed for that failure.

The public record this page relies on stops there. The Sixth Circuit docket in No. 24-6158 shows an order entered November 4, 2025, but that document is not available without a PACER account, so no outcome is reported here. Anyone who needs the appeal's current posture should open the docket directly rather than rely on a summary. What can be said with confidence is narrower: the law has been enforceable since the January 2025 stay, and no published merits decision from the Sixth Circuit upholding or striking down the PTMA has been identified.

Two Different Skrmetti Cases: Do Not Confuse Them

Tennessee is a defendant in more than one age-verification lawsuit, and search results for "Tennessee Skrmetti age verification" easily conflate two genuinely separate cases. Free Speech Coalition v. Skrmetti, No. 24-6158, is the case described above, challenging the PTMA's adult-content age-verification requirement.

NetChoice, LLC v. Skrmetti, No. 25-5660, is a different case entirely, challenging Tennessee's Protecting Children from Social Media Act, a separate statute governing parental consent and age verification for social media platforms rather than adult content. It came out of the Middle District of Tennessee, was argued February 4, 2026, and was decided August 28, 2026: the Sixth Circuit held that NetChoice's members had shown irreparable harm, vacated the district court's ruling on the preliminary-injunction motion, and remanded for further consideration. Judge Batchelder wrote for the court, joined by Judge Ritz, with Judge Clay dissenting. The two cases share a defendant's name but carry different docket numbers and concern different statutes, and a source describing one should not be read as describing the other.

Statutory citations here were checked against the bill and public chapter texts published by the Tennessee General Assembly and against the federal district court order that first construed the Act. The appeal's posture is reported from the Sixth Circuit's public docket in No. 24-6158; its most recent entry, an order dated November 4, 2025, is not publicly available, so no disposition is stated. Current as of 2026-09-02.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• Texas Age Verification Law
• Mississippi Age Verification Law
• KOSA and COPPA 2.0

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Last updated: 2026-09-02.