A circuit judge in Montgomery, Alabama signed a consent decree on Friday, September 25, 2026 that requires TikTok to cut users aged 13 to 17 off most of the app after 120 minutes of use each day by default, to shut them out between midnight and 6am, and to pay the state $116.2 million. A further $183.8 million depends on how many other attorneys general strike comparable agreements, and a stricter tier of restrictions waits on whether Meta, Snap and YouTube accept equivalent terms.

In Short

TikTok settled Alabama's lawsuit days before trial, agreeing to pay the state $116.2 million now and up to $183.8 million more if enough other states sign similar deals. In Alabama, anyone the app knows or predicts to be 13 to 17 will by default lose most of TikTok after 120 minutes a day and overnight, although search, messages and videos of at least 10 minutes keep working. If you advertise to teenagers, the short-video feed in that state gets smaller, while search and longer videos stay open. Harder limits only arrive if Meta, Snap and YouTube accept matching rules in Alabama.

What the court entered

Circuit Judge Monet M. Gaines approved the Stipulated Final Judgment and Consent Decree in State of Alabama ex rel. Steve Marshall v. TikTok Inc. et al., case number 03-CV-2025-900628.00 in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County. The clerk's electronic notice records the filing at 4:29:53 PM on September 25, 2026, docketed as Document 825. The decree defines its Effective Date as the day the executed document is approved by, and becomes an order of, the court. That was the same Friday, and every deadline in the roughly 40-page document counts forward from it.

The timing was tight. According to the Alabama Attorney General's office, the case was scheduled to go to trial on Monday, and Alabama would have been the first state to take its claims against TikTok to trial. The state filed suit in April 2025, according to the Alabama Reflector, alleging that TikTok deployed addictive algorithms aimed at children, exposed minors to harmful material and misrepresented its safety features. The same outlet reported that TikTok moved to dismiss in June 2025, citing Section 230 immunity and COPPA, the federal children's privacy statute.

The company concedes nothing. The decree was entered "without trial or adjudication of any issue of fact or law, and without a finding or admission of wrongdoing or liability of any kind." Paragraph 1.5 adds that the defendants expressly deny any violation, and paragraph 1.7 records the parties' intent that the document not be admissible in other cases. No private right of action flows from it. Alabama law governs.

Seven entities sit on the defendants' side: TikTok Inc., TikTok LLC, TikTok Ltd., TikTok Pte. Ltd., ByteDance Ltd., ByteDance Inc. and the company that now operates the American app. A footnote states that TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. filed certificates of conversion and formation with the Delaware Secretary of State on December 19, 2025, becoming a limited liability company titled TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. PPC Land reported that joint venture's formation on January 22, 2026, with ByteDance retaining a 19.9 percent stake.

Rhon E. Jones of Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles signed for Attorney General Steve Marshall; Robert Poundstone of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings and Stephen D. Brody of O'Melveny & Myers signed for the defendants. Notices to the company go to two named recipients in Culver City, California, at bytedance.com email addresses.

Scope is narrow in two ways. Paragraph 3.1 applies the compliance provisions to the operation of TikTok "in the State of Alabama." And paragraph 2.22 limits "TikTok" to the short-form video service, excluding any other product, service or application of the defendants or their affiliates, "whether or not it shares user accounts, credentials, login, infrastructure, or content with TikTok."

The money, and how much of it depends on other states

The guaranteed portion, labelled Fund 1, totals $116,200,000.00. Of that, $14.2 million is allocated to attorneys' fees and $2 million to litigation expenses, with the decree directing payment to outside counsel. That fees and costs portion is due within 30 days, which means on or before October 25, 2026. The remaining $100 million is designated compensatory restitution and remediation under Section 162(f)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code and is due within 45 days, by November 9, 2026. It goes to the Office of the Alabama Attorney General, to be used at the attorney general's sole discretion "for any lawful purpose." The fund resolves the state's claims under the Alabama Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

Fees and costs account for 13.9 percent of Fund 1. Paragraph 4.4 caps that share at 25 percent of payments, and paragraph 4.1 requires the state to file a Form 1098-F identifying at least half of the $100 million as restitution.

Fund 2 is where the structure turns unusual. It is a contingent pool of $183,800,000.00 that vests in four tiers based on how many state attorneys general execute qualifying agreements with the defendants, including consent judgments, settlement agreements or Assurances of Voluntary Compliance:

  • Tier 1 vests at $55.14 million, or 30 percent, when ten attorneys general have signed, provided the tenth signs within 24 months of the Effective Date.
  • Tier 2 vests at another $55.14 million when twenty have signed, within 24 months of Tier 1 vesting.
  • Tier 3 vests at $36.76 million, or 20 percent, at thirty, within 24 months of Tier 2.
  • Tier 4 vests at the final $36.76 million at forty, within 24 months of Tier 3.

Each vested tier is paid in ten equal annual installments, the first due on December 31 of the vesting year or 60 days after vesting, whichever is later. A missed window is fatal: the tier and every later tier "shall permanently lapse, terminate, and be forfeited." The decree does not say whether Alabama's own agreement counts toward the first ten.

The arithmetic matters for anyone modelling exposure. Fund 2 makes up 61.3 percent of the $300 million ceiling. Once all four tiers have vested, installments total $18.38 million a year until each tier's ten payments are complete. If each tier vested on the last day of its window, the fourth would vest in September 2034 and its final installment would fall due at the end of 2043, well beyond the decree's five-year term, which paragraph 7.9 extends for payment provisions until they are satisfied.

The lever also runs in the opposite direction from Meta's. Meta's consent judgment of August 26, 2026 tied $5.02 billion of contingency money to whether Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopted equivalent rules, a participation trigger PPC Land compared with the 1998 tobacco settlement. Alabama's TikTok money is tied instead to whether TikTok signs with other states. In effect, the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth and fortieth state agreements each carry an extra bill payable to Alabama, provided they land inside their windows. How many attorneys general will want the same arrangement for themselves?

A third mechanism, a most-favoured-nation top-off, applies to Fund 1 only. It triggers if the states listed in Exhibit B of the Meta Consent Judgment, specifically excluding Texas, Florida and New Mexico, resolve their claims against the TikTok defendants and collectively recover more than $5.1 billion, not counting Alabama's payments. Alabama then receives 1.55 percent of the excess, a figure the decree describes as Alabama's share of the national population. Recovery of $6.1 billion, for example, would produce a $15.5 million top-off. Any such payment arrives in five equal annual installments, the first due 90 days after the trigger. The three excluded states match the pattern PPC Land documented in the Meta case, where Texas and Florida sat outside the settling group and New Mexico had already secured its own $567 million abatement order.

According to the attorney general's office, Alabama receives at least $100 million within 45 days and up to $300 million if conditions are met, figures consistent with the decree. The office put Alabama's share of last month's Meta settlement at $117 million, and listed the TikTok agreement alongside a Roblox settlement funding $12 million for school resource officers and a recently disclosed investigation into OpenAI.

A 120-minute default with several exits

Paragraph 3.19(a) defaults every Teen User to a maximum of two hours of TikTok a day, resetting at midnight in the device's local time zone. Once the ceiling is reached, the user loses access to the features it covers until the reset. Teen User is defined in paragraph 2.21 as anyone with a predicted or stated age between 13 and 17, so the prediction alone is enough to bring an account inside the ceiling.

Four categories are excluded from the count: time spent watching Longform Content, messaging, accessing settings, and Search. Reaching content through settings does count. The decree also rules out nudges toward the exempt surfaces: "TikTok shall not recommend or otherwise suggest that the Teen User engage in messaging or the watching of Longform Content." Unread-message badges are not a recommendation, and TikTok remains free to market its messaging features outside the limit interface.

Parents gain three further tools under paragraph 3.19: the ability to set a custom daily limit, which a teen can ask to extend; a dashboard summarising cumulative daily time over the last four weeks; and a Schedule Time Away feature that blocks access at recurring times, including school hours. Section E, which carries the default ceiling, does not itself state that loosening it requires parental approval. That lock appears for the night and school defaults in paragraph 3.18, for productive pauses in paragraph 3.20, and for the daily limit only in the contingent section.

The Longform Content threshold is where the TikTok decree departs most visibly from the Meta template. Meta's exemption starts at 22 minutes. TikTok's starts at ten. The definition otherwise mirrors Meta's: content must be determined "with a high degree of reliability" not to have been artificially extended, and compilations of shorter material or videos padded with a still image or silence do not qualify. Stitching short episodes of a microdrama into one long file would therefore not count, because compilations of content that is not itself Longform Content are expressly treated as artificial extension.

Search stays on

Search is the second structural difference, and arguably the larger one for advertising. Paragraph 2.19 defines it broadly: any query through textual, voice, image, video, visual, multimodal, smart search, artificial intelligence or conversational functionality, plus the user's access to, viewing of, or interaction with content surfaced in response, "including through related search recommendations, suggestions, notifications, or similar features."

Search sits outside the daily limit and remains available during the overnight block. Meta's judgment, by contrast, exempted only longform video, messaging and settings from its clock. The TikTok decree hedges the exemption with a functional limit in paragraph 3.14: "TikTok shall limit messaging, settings, and Search feature functionality to ensure that Teen Users cannot access broader TikTok features (beyond the content in a single message) and effectively circumvent Night Access Mode." Where viewing search-surfaced content ends and broader access begins is not defined. Parents, under paragraph 3.23, can decide whether their teen may search for videos, hashtags, LIVE videos, users and sounds at all.

The commercial stakes are not hypothetical. TikTok opened its Search Ads Campaign on September 24, 2024, citing its own June 2024 data that 57 percent of users use search and 23 percent search within 30 seconds of opening the app, figures that come from the company rather than from independent measurement. In May 2026 it added Search Hub formats that sell ownership of results pages. As drafted, the Alabama ceiling leaves that surface untouched.

Nights, school hours and notifications

Night Access Mode under paragraph 3.13 blocks Teen Users by default from midnight to 6am, device local time. Messaging stays available to teens otherwise eligible for it, and settings and Search remain available to all. During the block TikTok may show a neutral screen noting that other parts of the platform remain available, without mentioning messaging.

Push notifications are switched off for teens from 10pm to 7am, except urgent notifications related to messaging, account security or platform integrity, and a Supervising Parent may override the restriction. During School Hours, defined as 8am to 3pm Monday through Friday when the teen is in school, excluding school holidays and adjustable by a parent, push notifications are also disabled, again with exceptions for messaging, security and integrity. Paragraph 3.18 prevents teens from moving any of these defaults to a less restrictive setting without parental approval.

None of these carries its own deadline. Paragraph 7.8 therefore applies: any change not already made must be implemented as soon as reasonably practicable and no later than 180 days after the Effective Date, which places the outer limit on March 24, 2027.

Pauses, filters and feeds

Within four months, by January 25, 2027, TikTok must add productive pauses by default at 60 and 90 minutes of cumulative daily use, plus a clear and conspicuous notice upon any 15-minute session of continuous usage after each pause. Only a parent can relax them.

Paragraph 3.21 disables Cosmetic Procedure Filters for teens. The definition covers any filter or augmented reality effect that "idealizes a user's face in a way that cannot be achieved without cosmetic surgery," and excludes fantasy and character effects, ordinary makeup and smoothing effects, and parody or exaggeration. Meta's version reaches further, covering effects that distort, sculpt or redefine a face and those unachievable without extreme makeup, and it obliges the states to supply illustrative examples. The TikTok decree contains no equivalent examples mechanism, and it sets no specific date for the filter change, leaving it to the 180-day default.

Feeds follow a slower clock. Within nine months, by June 25, 2027, TikTok must give teens a reasonably accessible option to select a Non-Personalized Feed as their default home feed. Within ten days of identifying a new teen account, it must prompt the switch clearly and conspicuously, without preselecting either answer and separately from other settings. Parents in supervision can set the non-personalised feed, and reverting then requires their approval.

The definition in paragraph 2.15 is wider than Meta's. A qualifying feed ranks content on non-user-specific criteria and does not rely primarily on engagement, behavioural or social graph signals, and it may be ordered "chronologically, by general popularity, or based on other neutral or uniformly applied criteria." Meta's alternative, due in four months, is a chronological feed of followed accounts. A popularity-ranked feed of trending videos would satisfy TikTok's obligation.

That lands in a legal environment already hostile to engagement ranking for minors. A federal judge ruled on August 5, 2026 that minors' algorithmic feeds are not protected speech, and California has since enacted fines of up to $50,000 per child served addictive feeds.

Content standards rest largely on existing policy. Age Appropriate Experiences are tied to TikTok's 13-plus content settings, which the decree describes as "inspired by movie ratings for ages 13+ and parent feedback," the same reference point Instagram adopted in October 2025. Teen accounts stay private by default, and supervising parents receive time-spent data, messaging contacts, alerts about accounts flagged for financial blackmail or inappropriate interactions with children, and alerts on repeated suicide or self-harm searches. Paragraph 3.2 obliges TikTok to maintain its existing educational resources, including explanations of how the For You feed works and how content is recommended, for at least seven years.

Age assurance on a self-certified basis

Under a heading that describes these as age-gating measures, paragraph 3.4 extends two default protections to any stated adult whom TikTok predicts to be under 18: interventions restricting contact with Age Inappropriate Accounts, and content recommendations inspired by Age Appropriate Experiences.

The age assurance provisions then attach numbers. Within one year, by September 25, 2027, TikTok must establish measurement and model architecture that estimates age for 13 to 15 year olds and 16 to 17 year olds as distinct bands. Its U18 False Positive Rate, the share of real 13 to 17 year olds wrongly classified as 18 or older, may not exceed 14 percent for 16 and 17 year olds and 7 percent for 13 to 15 year olds in year one, tightening to 10 percent and 5 percent by September 25, 2028.

Those figures match the proprietary-method track in Meta's judgment exactly. Meta also faces a stricter 10 percent and 3 percent track for commercially available methods; TikTok's decree draws no such distinction. The verification model differs more. Meta's compliance runs through an independent auditor chosen within 60 days. TikTok instead certifies annually, "based on internal testing," that the thresholds are met, with documentation of method and results. An independent audit replaces self-certification only if at least 40 attorneys general, or enough to represent 60 percent of the US population, sign substantively equivalent obligations.

Users claiming misidentification as minors get an appeal. Circumvention rules follow Meta's closely. For any method a user can choose, such as ID verification or a face-based check like facial age estimation, completed attempts are capped at three per method in any 24 hours, four per month and six over two years, counted across hard-linked and soft-matched accounts. A proactive monitoring system must demand a fresh check when conduct suggests a user assessed as an adult is likely a teen, or a user assessed as 13 or older is likely under 13. Users who decline are treated as teens.

Data handling is tightly drawn. Data collected solely for age assurance, data from known under-13 users and vendor data must be held only as long as needed to determine age status, then queued for deletion. TikTok may keep under-13 data to develop and test its detection model, and method metadata where needed for system integrity, at "the coarsest viable granularity," deleting unneeded metadata within 90 days. The decree is explicit that "U13 Data cannot be used for purposes such as ads targeting and delivery, marketing, or algorithmic optimization efforts." None of these limits applies to a user's stated date of birth, stated age or the "teen or adult" classification itself.

Under-13 detection and two COPPA carve-outs

Within six months, by March 25, 2027, TikTok must use technical measures to find other accounts belonging to an identified under-13 user, review deleted accounts' friend networks for more, keep a simplified in-app reporting flow alongside its web tool for non-users, and assess posts and comments for reliable indicia of age. Absent any indicia, it must presume the user is under 13 for queue routing and enforcement. The parties agree that presumption is "a procedural platform safety rule and does not constitute, establish, or imply actual knowledge of user age" under COPPA, the standard that determines when the statute's obligations bite.

Within one year TikTok must develop, train and test a prototype U13 Age Model. That obligation is contingent on the decree's releases and on the continued application of the Federal Trade Commission's enforcement policy statement promoting age-verification technology, the document PPC Land covered when the agency gave age verification tools a conditional COPPA enforcement shield in February 2026. If the FTC withdraws it, TikTok falls back to best efforts.

In paragraph 3.7(h), Alabama releases and covenants not to sue under COPPA, the COPPA Rule or analogous state law over TikTok's maintenance or use of a child's personal information solely to detect and remove under-13 users "and not for any purposes concerning ads targeting and delivery, marketing, or algorithmic optimization efforts." TikTok reports to Alabama annually on the model until the 40-state threshold brings in an auditor, who would then review a Year 2 Enforcement Target and confirm the annual count of enforced removals.

Verified numbers are precisely what a federal judge found missing elsewhere. On September 18, 2026, Judge George Wu issued a tentative ruling that would refuse to lift TikTok's 2019 COPPA order, drawing a distinction between a platform holding compliance tools and showing they work. The Justice Department had tied $100 million of a $400 million settlement to vacating that order. Alabama's decree, outside any audit trigger, relies on the company's own testing.

The contingent tier and the rivals that unlock it

Paragraph 2.5 names three Core Industry Members: Meta, Snap and YouTube. Industry-Wide Adoption occurs, at any point before August 26, 2036, when all three, plus any qualifying new entrant, have signed a binding agreement with Alabama imposing substantively equivalent obligations, become subject to an effective federal or Alabama law imposing them, or voluntarily implemented them with an independent auditor's certification.

Only then does the Contingent Injunctive Relief in Section III.J switch on, for up to five years and never beyond August 26, 2036. It lapses entirely if any Core Industry Member or new entrant stops complying. The contingent tier widens the night block to 10pm through 7am, hides numerical reaction counts from teens, applies the daily limit across explicitly linked accounts, requires continued age assurance, and, if the 40-state threshold is met, starts a 60-day process to appoint an independent auditor. Otherwise TikTok documents compliance to Alabama once a year.

Two details stand out. The reaction-count clause in paragraph 3.32 covers the Friends Feed and content displayed on the teen's own profile page. It does not mention the For You feed. Meta's equivalent sits in its default tier and covers teens' own posts and everyone else's.

The contingent daily limit is also 120 minutes, the same ceiling already in the default tier, subject to one clause: "if the Industry Wide Adoption triggers in the Meta Consent Judgment is interpreted to require a 60-minute daily limit per company, such limit shall apply in lieu of this 120-minute requirement." Meta's Phase II, as PPC Land reported, sets 60 minutes per app with a cumulative 120-minute cap. For a company with one covered app, a per-app and a cumulative reading give different answers, and the drafters left that interpretation open.

The design is circular. Meta's contingent terms depend on TikTok, Snap and YouTube; TikTok's depend on Meta, Snap and YouTube. Both Meta and TikTok are now bound in Alabama, but neither text settles whether one's contingent terms count as substantively equivalent to the other's. The TikTok decree records no agreement by Snap or YouTube, and PPC Land's coverage of the Meta judgment reported none.

A New SMP Entrant can also join the gate. It must, for four consecutive months, let US teens create, share and view user-generated video and images, let them interact, compete for the same teen time as TikTok, and reach at least 5 million US monthly active teens averaging at least 30 minutes a day. Messaging apps, video editors, virtual reality, gaming and artificial intelligence chatbots are excluded, as are products available on the Effective Date that have not since redesigned to compete harder or significantly increased teen time. TikTok triggers the process by written notice. If the parties cannot agree within 60 days, TikTok may seek relief, and a qualifying entrant counts toward the trigger only five months after it qualifies.

Paragraph 1.9 adds a sentence that raises more questions than it answers: "The State represents that entry of this Final Judgment and Consent Decree satisfies the conditions applicable to the State under the Meta Consent Judgment." It does not identify which conditions. PPC Land's coverage of the Meta judgment described an Injunctive MFN under which a state that settles with Snap, TikTok or YouTube on terms more favourable than Meta's must modify Meta's agreement. Several TikTok terms are lighter: a 10-minute rather than 22-minute threshold, Search outside the clock, nine rather than four months for the feed option, reaction counts deferred to the contingent tier, and self-certification in place of an auditor. Whether any of that reaches Meta's clause, neither document says.

TikTok's own most-favoured-nation clause, paragraph 3.36, is softer. Alabama "may offer" TikTok the chance to match injunctive terms, whether more or less beneficial, given to a Core Industry Member in a later settlement. TikTok can accept or reject. Disputes go to meet-and-confer, then to the Montgomery court.

Enforcement, release and the exit

Before suing to enforce, Alabama must give written notice identifying the provision at issue and allow TikTok 60 days to respond. The release is broad. It covers any conduct "from the beginning of time through the Effective Date" relating to the design, development, marketing or advertising of TikTok or its features, or statements about them. Criminal and tax liability survive, as does antitrust liability other than unfair or deceptive practices claims, and environmental liability other than public nuisance claims tied to the alleged conduct. Claims by private individuals are preserved too, although that carve-out does not let the state or its releasors bring parens patriae claims. The releasors include, to the maximum extent of the attorney general's power, public entities and instrumentalities in the state. The Meta judgment, by contrast, preserved pending suits by school districts and municipalities. TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is named among the released successors.

Paragraph 7.9 gives TikTok a standing exit request. At any time, "based on Defendants' act or performance" or "for any other reason," the company may ask the state to modify or terminate the decree. Alabama must decide within 45 days, and the decision "shall rest solely within the discretion of the State." Otherwise the term is five years, ending September 25, 2031.

Where the documents disagree

Four inconsistencies are worth recording rather than resolving.

Pauses. The attorney general's office describes productive pauses interrupting use at 15, 60 and 90 minutes. The decree sets pauses at 60 and 90 minutes of cumulative use and a notice upon any 15-minute continuous session after each pause.

Feeds. The office lists non-personalised feed defaults for teen users. The decree requires an option and a prompt within nine months, and forbids preselecting either answer.

Duration. Paragraph 3.2 requires existing tools to be maintained for at least seven years, to September 2033, while paragraph 7.9 sets a five-year term and carves out only the payment provisions. The Industry-Wide Adoption window and the contingent tier both run to August 2036, also past the term.

Entity names. The caption lists TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. The opening paragraph names TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture LLC. The footnote and release use TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

What changes for advertisers

Alabama is a small market, 1.55 percent of the national population on the decree's own figure, and the obligations stop at its border. The template matters more than the territory. Payments scale with how many further states sign, the Meta judgment already covers 51 jurisdictions, and TikTok faces pressure well beyond Montgomery, from preliminary Digital Services Act findings in Brussels on its addictive design to the federal COPPA proceedings in Los Angeles.

For media buyers, the decree narrows teen short-video sessions in the state by March 2027 at the latest while leaving three surfaces outside the clock. Search is the most consequential. Neither the daily ceiling nor the overnight block touches the teen search audience, although parents can switch search off.

Audience definitions shift underneath targeting. Because a Teen User includes anyone predicted to be 13 to 17, and the accuracy target counts only real teens misclassified as adults, borderline accounts tilt toward teen treatment. Industry data already shows how weak age signals are, with a CIMM report finding presence-of-children data correct only 42 percent of the time, while Google now asks publishers to pass a TEEN tier in its TFAT age signal. The "teen or adult" outcome itself sits outside the decree's data-use limits.

Creator campaigns keep more than they do under Meta's settlement, since reaction counts stay visible to Alabama teens unless the contingent tier fires. Beauty activations built on face effects fare worse, losing Cosmetic Procedure Filters for teen accounts within 180 days.

Oversight is lighter as well, resting on self-certification unless 40 states sign and on a termination request TikTok can file at any time. The first markers are close: payments on October 25 and November 9, productive pauses by January 25, 2027, the full default package by March 24, 2027, and a Tier 1 deadline of September 25, 2028 that will show whether other attorneys general follow Alabama.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The State of Alabama, through Attorney General Steve Marshall and outside counsel Beasley Allen, and seven defendants: TikTok Inc., TikTok LLC, TikTok Ltd., TikTok Pte. Ltd., ByteDance Ltd., ByteDance Inc. and the US operating entity now called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Circuit Judge Monet M. Gaines signed the decree. Meta, Snap and YouTube are named as Core Industry Members whose participation would activate stricter terms.

What: A stipulated final judgment and consent decree, without admission of liability, requiring TikTok to default Alabama users aged 13 to 17 to a 120-minute daily ceiling that excludes Search, messaging, settings and videos of at least ten minutes; shut them out from midnight to 6am; mute notifications overnight and during school hours; add productive pauses; disable cosmetic procedure filters; offer a non-personalised feed; meet age estimation error thresholds of 14 and 7 percent in year one and 10 and 5 percent in year two; and build an under-13 detection model. TikTok pays $116.2 million, with $183.8 million more vesting in tiers as other attorneys general sign, and a population-based top-off if other states' recoveries exceed $5.1 billion.

When: Signed and filed on September 25, 2026, which is also the Effective Date, days before a trial set to open on September 28. Payments fall due by October 25 and November 9, 2026. Most product changes arrive between January and June 2027, age assurance milestones in September 2027 and 2028, and the decree's general term ends in September 2031.

Where: The Circuit Court of Montgomery County, Alabama, case 03-CV-2025-900628.00. The compliance provisions apply only to TikTok's operation in Alabama and only to the short-form video service, not to other applications of the defendants.

Why: According to the attorney general's office, Alabama alleged that TikTok designed its platform with addictive features, exposed young users to mental harms and misled the public about its safety. For the marketing community, the decree reproduces the Meta settlement's time limits with wider exemptions, most notably Search and a 10-minute video threshold, relies on self-certified age accuracy, ties further payments to other states joining, and leaves the stricter tier dependent on Meta, Snap and YouTube.