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.

Enforcement Is Private, Not a State Agency

Unlike Texas, where only the Attorney General can sue, Louisiana enforces Act 440 through a private right of civil action. 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 penalties apply if a verifier improperly retains identifying information. Specific civil-penalty dollar figures circulate in some compliance-vendor materials, but this research could not confirm those figures directly against the enrolled statute text, so this page does not repeat them.

No Legal Challenge Found

Act 440 has been in continuous effect since January 1, 2023 with no injunction or pending constitutional case identified in this research. That makes Louisiana's adult-content law the cleanest «enforced, unchallenged» entry in this comparison, distinct from Texas, Mississippi, and Utah, each of which had to survive a court fight of one kind or another to reach its current enforced status.

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 Louisiana Legislature's record on House Bill 977, and reporting on the Act 456 injunction, current as of 2026-08-13. This page does not repeat the unconfirmed civil-penalty dollar figures some secondary sources cite for Act 440; confirm those against the statute text directly before relying on a specific number.

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: 2026-08-13.