Wyoming Age Verification Law: W.S. 14-3-501 Requirements Explained

Wyoming requires covered internet platforms to verify a visitor's age before granting access to material harmful to minors, and enforces that requirement exclusively through private lawsuits: the statute bars the state and its political subdivisions from taking any enforcement action of their own.

What Wyoming's Age-Verification Law Requires

House Bill 43, enacted as 2025 Wyoming Session Laws chapter 139 (House Enrolled Act No. 70), is codified at Wyoming Statutes sections 14-3-501 through 14-3-504, titled «Age Verification for Websites with Obscene Material.» Governor Mark Gordon signed the bill March 13, 2025, and it took effect July 1, 2025. The codified statute covers age-verification requirements and exceptions, remedies, liability and damages, and applicability.

Wyoming's covered-platform definition carries no content-proportion threshold at all. Section 14-3-501(a)(iii) reaches any entity operating a website that, in the regular course of business, creates, hosts or makes available content that is material harmful to minors for purposes of making a profit, and it applies regardless of whether the entity earns a profit on that activity or makes such content its sole source of income or principal business. Any amount of qualifying material can therefore trigger the requirement, unlike age-verification statutes in states that apply only once such material passes a set percentage of a site's total content.

The Codified Citation: W.S. Sections 14-3-501 to 14-3-504

Wyoming Statutes sections 14-3-501 through 14-3-504 are the confirmed codification of HB 43, verified directly against Wyoming's own official Title 14 statutory compilation (wyoleg.gov). Section 14-3-501 is a definitions section and imposes no duty of its own. Section 14-3-502 is the section that creates the age-verification mandate for a covered platform and the prohibition on retaining a user's identifying information after verification. Section 14-3-503 creates the private cause of action described below, with the $5,000-per-instance damages figure at subsection (e). An earlier draft of this page could not confirm this citation and instead cited only the session-law chapter; that gap is now resolved.

Enforcement: Private Lawsuits Only

Wyoming enforces HB 43 through private lawsuits and nothing else. Section 14-3-503(h) provides that violations of W.S. section 14-3-502 «shall be enforced exclusively through the civil actions provided in this section» and that «no direct or indirect enforcement of this article shall be taken or threatened by the state or any other political subdivision of the state against any person in any manner whatsoever» except as that section provides. The Attorney General has no enforcement role under this article.

The section creates two different claims. Under subsection (a), a parent or guardian of a minor aggrieved by a violation of section 14-3-502 has a cause of action on the minor's behalf, and under subsection (e) a plaintiff who succeeds on that claim receives $5,000 for each instance the covered platform failed to perform reasonable age verification, in addition to the damages, court costs and reasonable attorney fees available under subsection (c). Each failure to verify counts as a separate violation. Under subsection (b), any person may sue a covered platform that knowingly retained identifying information after granting access; that claim recovers damages, court costs and reasonable attorney fees, but not the $5,000-per-instance statutory award, which subsection (e) ties to the parent-or-guardian action alone.

Wyoming's law also prohibits a covered platform from retaining any identifying information about a person once age verification has been completed, confirmed at W.S. section 14-3-502(b), a data-minimization requirement similar to what several other states in this category impose.

How Wyoming's Law Fits the National Pattern

Wyoming's law joins a wave of state statutes enacted since the mid-2020s requiring age verification before access to adult content. The U.S. Supreme Court decided Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton on June 27, 2025, four days before Wyoming's law took effect on July 1, 2025. That decision upheld a nearly identical Texas law and held that this category of statute triggers, and survives, intermediate scrutiny rather than the stricter standard some challengers had argued for.

Wyoming's exclusively private enforcement model, with its set $5,000-per-instance damages figure, is a structural choice about who can sue, separate from the underlying constitutional question Paxton addressed. Wyoming's statute has not itself been tested in court as of this writing.

Litigation Status

No lawsuit challenging HB 43 was found in this research. The ACLU of Wyoming publicly opposed the bill while it was moving through the Legislature, documenting its objections on the organization's own website, but that opposition did not result in a filed legal challenge as of this writing.

Verified directly against Wyoming's own official Title 14 statutory compilation (wyoleg.gov) and the official enrolled act text of HB 43 (House Enrolled Act No. 70) for Wyoming Statutes sections 14-3-501 through 14-3-504, current as of 2026-09-02, plus Wyoming's own Legislative Service Office bill record for the legislative timeline. An earlier draft of this page could not confirm the codified section number and cited only the session-law chapter; that has now been resolved.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• South Dakota Age Verification Law
• West Virginia Age Verification Law
• Texas Age Verification Law

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Last updated: 2026-09-02.