Alabama Age Verification Law: HB 164 Requirements Explained

Alabama's age-verification law for adult content, House Bill 164, took effect October 1, 2024. It requires a commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes sexual material harmful to minors through an adult website to use a reasonable age-verification method, and it separately imposed a 10 percent tax on gross receipts from covered adult content.

What Alabama's Age-Verification Law Requires

House Bill 164, enacted during Alabama's 2024 Regular Session and effective October 1, 2024, requires a commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes sexual material harmful to minors through an adult website to use a reasonable age-verification method:

Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes sexual material harmful to minors through an adult website shall use a reasonable age-verification method to provide reasonable assurance that individuals under 18 years of age cannot access the material.

Alabama's own legislative site renders statute pages through JavaScript that a standard fetch cannot read, so this research was not able to independently confirm the exact codified Alabama Code section the age-verification duty now occupies, though secondary compliance sources place it within Title 8, Chapter 19G. This page identifies the law by its bill citation rather than assert an unconfirmed section number.

The 10 Percent Adult-Content Tax

Alongside the age-verification duty, HB 164 imposed a 10 percent tax on a commercial entity's gross receipts from adult content covered by the law, layering a financial obligation on top of the verification requirement. No case testing the tax provision's constitutionality separately from the age-verification mandate was found in this research. Practically, the tax reinforces the incentive the verification requirement already creates: a platform doing business in Alabama has to decide whether to build compliant infrastructure and pay the tax, or exit the state's market instead.

Enforcement and How Sites Have Responded

Alabama enforces HB 164 through its consumer-protection framework, giving the Attorney General's office authority to act against noncompliant sites. Rather than build age-verification systems, major platforms including Aylo, Pornhub's parent company, chose to geo-block Alabama IP addresses entirely, consistent with the pattern Aylo has followed in most states with similar laws. That is the company's own business decision. Alabama's statute requires a covered site to verify a visitor's age; it does not require the site to block Alabama traffic, and it does not make adult content illegal to view once a visitor is verified as an adult.

No Legal Challenge Found

This research did not find a lawsuit challenging HB 164 on First Amendment or other constitutional grounds. NetChoice's own litigation tracker, checked directly, lists no Alabama entry among the states where it or its members have sued over an age-verification law. Alabama news coverage of the law's rollout, including reporting on Pornhub's IP-block response, likewise does not mention a pending case. That absence is a researched finding as of this writing, not a guarantee that no challenge exists or could be filed later.

Alabama's Separate App Store Accountability Act

Alabama also enacted a second, unrelated age-related law: House Bill 161, an App Store Accountability Act signed by Governor Kay Ivey in February 2026. Unlike HB 164, which targets adult websites directly, HB 161 places age-verification and parental-consent duties on app-store operators and app developers. It takes effect January 1, 2027 for new accounts and October 1, 2027 for existing accounts, and combines Attorney General enforcement with a private right of action. Alabama was, by most accounts, the fourth state to enact this type of law. See the App Store Accountability Act overview for how Alabama's law compares to Utah's, Texas's, and Louisiana's.

Where Alabama's Law Fits Nationally

Alabama's law follows the same basic model the Supreme Court reviewed and upheld in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U.S. 461 (2025), decided June 27, 2025: a commercial entity that publishes material harmful to minors online must use reasonable age verification. The Court held that this type of law triggers, and survives, intermediate scrutiny, not the stricter standard adult-industry plaintiffs had argued for. That decision did not directly involve Alabama and does not by itself resolve any future challenge to HB 164, but it is the controlling precedent any such challenge would have to overcome, and it is a plausible part of why no challenge to HB 164 has surfaced in this research.

Verified directly against Alabama House Bill 164 coverage and Alabama's separate App Store Accountability Act coverage, cross-checked against NetChoice's litigation tracker and Alabama news reporting on the law's rollout, current as of 2026-08-13. Alabama's exact codified Alabama Code section number could not be independently confirmed against the state's own legislative site this session and is deliberately not printed; this page cites the bill number instead.

Related Resources

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

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Last updated: 2026-08-13.