Ofcom's approach to implementing the Online Safety Act

Online safety Online pornography Illegal and harmful content Information for industry

Published: 26 October 2023

Last updated: 12 November 2025

An update on online safety implementation plans

This year we have made significant progress in implementing the Online Safety Act (the Act). We completed our Illegal Harms and Protection of Children codes and guidance on implementing highly effective age assurance and started driving compliance with these core requirements. We have also delivered other key building blocks of the Online Safety regime, including those relating to setting up our fees, super-complaints, and transparency reporting functions.

Below we provide an update on the remaining implementation steps for the regime. This focuses purely on when we will deliver the codes, guidance, statutory reports, and advice to Secretary of State that is required under the Act.

This does not provide a look ahead on our ongoing work to drive compliance and monitor online harms across the industry. In early December, we will publish a report providing an overview of the industry response since duties under the Act have come into force and our headline online safety priorities for 2026.

Our key future milestones

Looking ahead, our key implementation deliverables under the Act will be (broadly in chronological order) :

Now until the end of 2025

November 2025	Guidance on a safer life online for women and girls. After consulting in February 2025, we will finalise our guidance for improving women and girls’ online safety on 25 November 2025. We also intend to publish an assessment of how providers are keeping women and girls safer on their services around 18 months later.
December 2025	Supporting information gathering on deceased child users. In December, we will publish a consultation on our draft guidance for categorised services concerning the disclosure of information about a deceased child’s use of their platform. We expect these duties, which only apply to categorised services, to come into force in late 2026 when we finalise the guidance. This is part of the additional duties that apply to categorised services (which we discuss further below). We will also publish an update in December to our information powers guidance, which will cover our final guidance on data preservation notices to support coroners’ investigations into a child’s online activity and updated guidance on coroners’ information notices.
End of 2025	Industry fees. Providers whose “qualifying worldwide revenue” is above a threshold to be set by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology have a duty to pay fees. We expect the fees regime to come into force shortly, subject to completion of the Parliamentary process. Once in force, there will be a 4-month notification window for relevant platforms to submit their revenue data to Ofcom for the 2026/27 charging year.

From January 2026 onwards

February 2026	Super-complaints. Following our consultation launched in September 2025, we will publish our final guidance in February 2026. This will provide information to eligible entities on how to raise to our attention issues that arise across services, or on one service in exceptional circumstances (in line with the Act and Government regulations). We will be ready to handle super-complaints when the regime comes into force.
April 2026	Technology notices. Under section 121 of the Act, Ofcom can in limited circumstances require providers of user-to-user or search providers to use accredited technology to identify and prevent users encountering child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) and/or terrorism content on their service. We have consulted on policy proposals for minimum standards of accuracy for accredited technology that deals with CSEA and/or terrorism content. We have also consulted on draft guidance to providers on how we propose to exercise our technology notice function. We will publish our advice to the Secretary of State and our final guidance to providers by April 2026. After the Secretary of State has published the minimum standards of accuracy, Ofcom (or another person appointed by Ofcom) will stand up a process to accredit technologies as having met them.
Spring 2026	Media literacy statement of recommendations. In September 2025, we published our consultation on draft recommendations for how online platforms should promote media literacy. It set out our expectations for how regulated services should give people the right skills, understanding and tools to take control of their online experience, gain digital confidence, and critically engage with the content they see. We will review responses to the consultation and aim to publish our final statement of recommendations in spring 2026.
Summer 2026	Categorisation and additional duties on categorised services. The Government’s secondary legislation setting the thresholds that will determine which services are categorised under the Act was subject to legal challenge, which concluded in August 2025. We have considered the implications of the judgment and have adjusted our plans for the categorisation register and the consultation on the additional duties that will apply to categorised services accordingly. We will now be carrying out a representations process in early 2026, which will give the services that we believe meet the threshold conditions an opportunity to comment on our provisional decisions before we finalise the register. Subject to the outcome of this process, we plan to publish the categorisation register and consult on the additional duties that apply to categorised services around July 2026. This consultation will cover duties relating to fraudulent advertising, terms of service, user empowerment, ID verification, news publisher content, journalistic content, and content of democratic importance. We will publish our final policy statements as soon as possible, by mid-2027. Where we can, we will bring forward final statements ahead of the main package to maintain pace. We are already planning on publishing our final statement on the terms of service guidance in early 2027.
Summer 2026	Transparency regime. We issued final guidance on transparency reporting in July 2025. After we have published the register of categorised services, we will issue notices to categorised services within a few weeks, requiring them to publish transparency reports. Our aim is that these reports give meaningful insights into safety measures and help users to make informed choices. All categorised services will be required to publish their first reports by summer 2027. We will then start publishing our own transparency reports to summarise conclusions drawn from platform reports from 2028.
Summer 2026	Age assurance statutory report. As required by the Act, we will publish a report by the end of July 2026 assessing how services have used age assurance and how effective it has been for the purpose of complying with their duties under the Act. We recently published a Call for Evidence asking for input on this topic.
Autumn 2026	Additional safety measures to improve our codes. In June 2025 we launched a consultation on a targeted set of additional safety measures designed to make online services safer, building on our Illegal Harms and Protection of Children Codes. These include measures to prevent illegal content going viral, tackling harms at the source, and adding more protections for children in relation to livestreams. The consultation closed recently, and we are currently considering consultation responses. We will publish our statement by autumn 2026 and will provide an update with more specific detail on timings once we have reviewed all the responses.
October 2026	Content harmful to children statutory report. As required under the Act, we will review and report on the incidence and severity of content harmful to children and publish our findings in October 2026. This will include advice as to whether we consider that changes to primary priority content and priority content are appropriate.
November 2026	The Online Information Advisory Committee will publish its first statutory report no later than 1 November 2026. The Committee also intends to publish information about individual projects it carries out.
January 2027	App stores statutory report: As required under the Act, we will publish a report on the use of app stores by children by January 2027. This will assess the role app stores play in children encountering harmful content and evaluate the use and effectiveness of age assurance by app store providers. This will support the Secretary of State in determining whether app store providers should be brought into scope of the Act. We recently published a Call for Evidence asking for input on this topic.

In recent months, the Government has announced that it will add to the “priority” offences under the Act. This includes content encouraging or assisting serious self-harm, cyberflashing, and online porn showing strangulation or suffocation. We are considering how we can give effect to these changes as soon as possible.

Progress update on implementing the Online Safety Act

Update on online safety implementation plans 12 November 2025 (PDF, 161 KB)

Update – what's changed since our roadmap (15 June 2023)

We published an update on how Ofcom is preparing to regulate online safety, including expected timescales and what's changed since we published our roadmap.