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 backs that requirement with a $5,000-per-instance private lawsuit right rather than exclusive Attorney General enforcement.

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.

Some secondary sources describe Wyoming's covered-platform definition as applying without the roughly one-third content-proportion threshold that South Carolina and West Virginia use, meaning any amount of qualifying material could trigger the requirement rather than only sites where such material makes up a substantial portion of total content. That characterization comes from a vendor compliance blog rather than an independently confirmed read of the statutory text, so it should be treated as a plausible but unconfirmed distinction rather than a settled fact.

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 14-3-502 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: A Private Right of Action With a Set Damages Figure

Wyoming enforces HB 43 through a private right of action rather than Attorney General enforcement alone. Under W.S. section 14-3-503, a parent or guardian can recover $5,000 for each instance a covered platform failed to perform reasonable age verification, plus court costs and attorney fees, confirmed at subsection (e) of the codified statute. That is a lower per-instance figure than the statutory damages reported for West Virginia's private right of action, but it follows the same basic model of letting an affected individual sue directly rather than depending solely on state enforcement.

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's June 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, decided a few months after Wyoming's law took effect, 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 private-right-of-action 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) for Wyoming Statutes sections 14-3-501 through 14-3-504, current as of 2026-08-14, plus Wyoming's own enrolled-act identity records and independently corroborated compliance-tracking sources 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

---

Last updated: 2026-08-13.