Were any 2024-2025 age-of-consent bills signed into law or vetoed, and by which governors?
Executive summary
Several state-level “age” bills across 2024–2025 reached governors’ desks with mixed outcomes: governors signed multiple laws raising minimum marriage ages or banning marriage under 18 in 2024, while governors also vetoed a handful of social-media age-verification or minors’-privacy bills in the same period; reporting identifies specific gubernatorial actions in Virginia, Washington, New Hampshire, and Florida’s executive branch as well as vetoes by Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Colorado’s Jared Polis on related minors’ online-safety legislation [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. Laws banning marriage under 18: governors who signed reforms in 2024
A wave of state statutes eliminating exceptions to child marriage were enacted in 2024: Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, is reported to have signed a law in April 2024 banning marriage under the age of 18 with no exceptions [1], Washington’s legislature enacted a similar ban in March 2024 (the reporting records the ban’s passage) [1], and New Hampshire’s Senate Bill 359 — celebrated as a victory against child marriage — was signed into law in June 2024 after unanimous Senate passage and a closely divided House vote earlier in the year [2].
2. New Hampshire: legislature pushed a raise to 18 and moved the bill to the governor
In New Hampshire the House passed legislation in May 2024 to raise the legal marriage age to 18 and sent the measure to Governor Chris Sununu’s desk after years of advocacy; local reporting documents the House passage and the legislative momentum behind the reform [3]. The publicly available accounts indicate the bill reached the governor but do not, in the supplied excerpts, record whether Sununu signed or vetoed that specific May 2024 House action — reporting confirms passage to his desk but does not show his final action in the provided sources [3].
3. Social-media age-verification bills: high-profile vetoes by governors
Separate from marriage-age laws, several states considered or passed social-media age-verification or parental-consent regimes for minors in 2024–2025; Florida’s then‑governor Ron DeSantis is documented as vetoing an age-verification bill on March 1, 2024, stating the legislature planned a better alternative [4], and Colorado’s governor Jared Polis vetoed SB 86, a social-media-related bill, as noted in end-of-session summaries [5]. Arkansas’s governor (Sarah Huckabee Sanders) signed multiple children’s online-privacy bills into law in 2025, illustrating that executive responses varied by state and by the policy substance of each proposal [5].
4. The policy patchwork and political incentives behind governor decisions
The pattern is not monolithic: governors who signed marriage-age bans framed them as child-protection reforms and responded to years of advocacy, while governors who vetoed social-media measures often cited legislative process, privacy or constitutional concerns, or promised alternative approaches [2] [4] [5]. Advocacy groups and news analysis characterize the resulting landscape as a complex state-by-state patchwork where exceptions and carve-outs (pregnancy, judicial approval, military service) remain politically salient and sometimes reintroduced after bans are passed [2] [6].
5. What the reporting does and does not show — limits and open questions
Available sources clearly identify governors who signed or vetoed specific 2024–2025 items — e.g., Youngkin signing Virginia’s ban [1], DeSantis vetoing an age-verification bill [4], and New Hampshire legislation being sent to Gov. Sununu’s desk [3] — but the supplied snippets do not uniformly record every governor’s final signature or veto on every bill introduced across those two years; where the record here is silent, the analysis refrains from asserting outcomes not documented in the provided reporting [3] [1] [4].
Conclusion: direct answer
Yes — in 2024 several state bills raising the marriage age or banning marriage under 18 were signed into law by governors (for example, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin signed a ban in April 2024 and New Hampshire’s SB 359 was signed in June 2024), and at the same time governors vetoed notable age-related online-safety bills (for example, Florida’s Ron DeSantis vetoed an age‑verification social-media bill on March 1, 2024; Colorado’s Gov. Polis vetoed SB 86) according to the sources provided [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Where the sources do not record a governor’s final action on a specific measure, that absence is noted rather than filled by inference [3].