Texas age verification law

Texas requires age verification under HB 1181 (2023, codified at Tex. CPRC §129B) for commercial entities operating websites with one-third or more sexual material harmful to minors. The statute mandates verification using government-issued identification or commercially reasonable transactional data — not a specific verification mechanism. Document capture, liveness, and face match is one valid implementation; transactional-data signals (credit-card-issuer cross-reference, third-party identity attestations) are also valid implementations under the statute. The age-verification requirement's litigation posture: the District Court initially granted a preliminary injunction; the Fifth Circuit vacated that injunction; the U.S. Supreme Court then affirmed the constitutionality of the age-verification requirement in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (2025). The age-verification provisions are firmly enforceable; the compelled health-warning provisions of HB 1181 remain subject to separate litigation and are out of scope for this page.

Enforcement: the Texas Attorney General has civil-enforcement authority. Penalties under HB 1181 §129B.006 stack across three distinct provisions: (a) up to $10,000 per day the covered entity operates a website without performing the required age verification (§129B.006(b)(1)); (b) up to $10,000 per instance for retaining identifying information collected during verification in violation of §129B.002(b) (§129B.006(b)(2)); and (c) up to an additional $250,000 if a minor accesses harmful material as a result of a covered entity's failure to verify (§129B.006(b)(3)). The Texas AG has filed multiple HB 1181 enforcement actions, beginning in early 2024 (the Aylo / Pornhub action announced February 2024 and the Multi Media + Hammy Media actions announced March 2024) and continuing after the SCOTUS decision; the case docket is publicly searchable on the Office of the Attorney General's site.

Who must comply: HB 1181 covers "commercial entities" — businesses operating for commercial purposes. The one-third-or-more threshold is calculated against the website's total content volume; legacy general-purpose platforms that incidentally host adult content are typically below the threshold. Platforms that meet the threshold must implement age verification before content access; the statute applies to operators serving Texas-located users regardless of where the operator is based.

How Stile satisfies the verification side: Stile's age-verification flow produces a signed eligibility signal that meets the "reasonable age verification" standard HB 1181 requires. The default Stile implementation pairs document capture (driver's license, state ID, or US-issued mDL) with liveness and face match against the document portrait — high-confidence age verification that exceeds the statutory minimum. Operators can also configure transactional-data implementations for use cases where the user friction of document capture is a conversion concern; both shapes produce the signed audit pointer the Texas AG accepts during a compliance inquiry.

Retention is statutorily constrained. HB 1181 §129B.002(b) prohibits both covered entities and third-party verifiers (including verification vendors like Stile) from retaining identifying information after the age verification has been performed. For TX-covered flows, the operator must configure zero source-document retention; the per-session audit pointer (which contains no identifying information) remains as the compliance artifact a Texas AG inquiry receives. Stile's default delete-on-completion retention setting satisfies §129B.002(b); operators must not enable optional retention windows on TX-covered flows or both the covered entity and Stile (as third-party verifier) face the separate per-instance retention penalty under §129B.006(b)(2).

Age verification — the underlying age-tier resolution flow. Identity verification — full identity-attribute case. Digital ID verification — mDL deep dive. Texas has not yet shipped a state-issued mDL program; physical-credential capture remains the Texas verification default. Age-restricted commerce ships HB 1181-specific configuration.