As of 25 July 2025, all sites and apps that allow pornography will need to have strong age checks in place, to make sure children can’t access that or other harmful content.
This is a significant change to how adults in the UK access pornography, and is a key step in helping to protect children from harmful content when they’re online.
We understand there are some questions about how the new rules will work. So, we’ve put together this explainer to clear things up for people in the UK who use these online services.
If you’re a service provider, more information on what you need to do can be found on our Adults only page and our guide to implementing highly effective age assurance.
Why are these new rules being introduced?
The rules are being introduced under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom is the UK’s regulator for online safety, and keeping children safe when they’re online is a priority for us.
Until now, it’s been too easy for children to see harmful content, including pornography online. New research from Ofcom has found that eight per cent of children aged 8-14 in the UK visited an online porn site or app in a month – including around 3% of 8–9-year-olds – the youngest children in the study.
Boys aged 13-14 were mostly likely to visit a porn service, significantly more than girls the same age. With older teenagers also likely accessing pornography, the total number of under-18s exposed to adult content will be higher still.
Our research also shows that the vast majority of adults (80%) support age checks on online pornographic sites as a means of protecting children.
As the regulator, we won’t be assessing individual pieces of content, or telling online services to remove legal material. Our role is not to stop adults from accessing legal pornography, but from 25 July stronger checks will be needed and crucially, just ticking a box to say you're over 18 will no longer be enough.
As well as pornography, we expect the riskiest services to use strong age checks to protect children from suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content and other types of harmful content, while preserving adults’ rights to access legal content.
How will this affect me as a user?
When you visit a site or app that allows pornography, you shouldn’t be able to see this content before you’re asked to confirm your age. To make the experience more accessible and transparent, you should be able to read a statement setting out the kinds of age checks that you can use, and how they work.
To comply with Ofcom’s rules, the age check process should be technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair.
And how will I prove my age?
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
- Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
- Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
- Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
- Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
- Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
- Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
- Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours.
How do I know my information will be kept private?
Strong age checks can be done effectively, safely, and in a way that protects your privacy. As with everything you do online, you should exercise a degree of caution and judgement when giving over personal information.
Data protection in the UK is regulated and enforced by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)..
We work closely with the ICO and where we have concerns that a provider has not complied with data protection law, we may refer the matter to the ICO.
In the UK people are familiar with having to prove their age in the offline world to buy age-restricted goods like alcohol and tobacco. Age checks to access online pornography are just the same. It will help stop children from encountering pornography online, in the same way that a child should not be able to simply walk into a shop and buy a pornographic DVD or magazine.
How will Ofcom enforce the new rules?
We expect sites and apps to engage with us and comply with their duties under our new rules.
If they don’t, we can impose fines of up to £18m or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue (whichever is greater). And in the most serious cases, we can ask a court to impose sanctions on third parties, such as internet providers, which could lead to the site being blocked or restricted in the UK.