Update: Age Assurance, Content Gating, and Safety Notes (24th June 2026)

This post is a copy of our blog post, available on our website here.

You can also view the video version of this post on YouTube:

As always, we've been getting a lot of questions about Age Verification and Content Gating, and the answers floating around right now are all over the place. The last time we gave you an update was back in December 2025, where we pointed to the first half of 2026 for these changes. Building them properly has taken longer than that sentence made it sound, so let's get you up to date on where things actually stand.

First off, this is a status update, not a list of promises. We're not giving release dates, because, honestly? We don't have them to give. This stuff has to be built and tested properly before it goes live, and any date we committed to today could be wrong by next month.

What we can do is tell you what we're building, why we're building it, and roughly in what order we're building it.

Changing Age "Verification" to Age "Assurance"

So, first off: you're going to start seeing us say Age Assurance where we used to say Age Verification. That's a deliberate change.

Age assurance is an umbrella term for the different ways we can determine a person's age. Underneath Age Assurance are a few different methods, and they aren't different versions of the same thing. Instead, they're different tools for different situations, sometimes used solo, and sometimes used in tandem.

In other words? Age assurance is the category, which contains the methods of assuring age. It's the same way "payment" is a category that includes both cash and cards as members. Estimation and verification are methods inside Age Assurance.

So, why are we taking you to school on terminology?

That's because we're going to adjust which assurance methods and providers that we lean on. There's been a clear shift both across the industry, and in what you have been asking us for, toward age-estimation approaches. So, we're moving with it.

Age Assurance starts in the United Kingdom

The first place that will see these changes is the United Kingdom. This is because of our need to keep up with changing requirements in the UK, as well as it being a good place to run a test before rolling something out worldwide.

So, for those in the UK: once we start doing this, you'll get a link to go get age-assured. When this rolls out in the UK, we plan to offer it for free while we learn what it costs us to run at scale.

Once you've gone through the process, it'll act the same inside VRChat as Age Verification does today. If you're 18 or older, you'll be marked as Age Verified. The process might look a little different, too, but will have the same end result.

This will roll out in waves, taking a few months to roll out to everyone in the UK. If you don't want to wait that long, Age Assurance will continue to be available to anyone who subscribes to VRC+ for one month or more. As always, you do not need to maintain a VRC+ subscription to retain your Age Assurance status.

Content Gating

We're also making some changes to Content Gating. Again, these are starting in the UK.

First off, these changes come after Age Assurance, not alongside. We're thinking a few months will pass between the experimental launch of Age Assurance and the launch of these Content Gating changes. This might be shorter or longer depending on how well the Age Assurance rollout goes.

If you're already Age Verified, or, if you've gone through the Age Assurance process and you're at or over the age of 18, nothing is going to change.

However, if you are not Age Verified / Assured, or your age has been determined to be under the age of 18, then the Content Gating filter for "Sexually Suggestive" content will be toggled on and cannot be toggled off. This means that the content will not be visible to you, and will be replaced with a placeholder. This is the only category of filter that's changing right now.

For creators, this means you should review your uploaded content and ensure it is properly tagged now. Anything that could fit the description of "Sexually Suggestive" as described in our Creator Guidelines should be tagged. If you're in doubt? Tag it anyways. Better safe than sorry!

When Gating switches on, you'll have time to go back through your content and make sure it's tagged correctly. We're going to be reasonable about this. We're not looking to spring enforcement on anyone unexpectedly or over-enforce out of the gate. We want to work with you to make sure tagging works out for everyone.

But, it is important to tag your content properly, especially anything new you upload. Once the grace period ends, content that should be tagged and isn't will eventually face enforcement action.

Where this goes next (and where it gets harder)

So, Content Gating is something we can extend more broadly without too much trouble.

On the other hand, Age Assurance at no cost for every user in every region is a harder problem. There are real cost and coverage challenges to assuring everyone everywhere, and we'd rather be straight with you about that than pretend it's a switch we can flip.

To put it bluntly: we don't have the same resources as other companies that offer this for free to everyone. These Age Assurance services have a cost, and as regulatory requirements change across the world, we're having to adapt. We're going to do our best, and we appreciate your patience as we work through it.

There's no date on the wider rollout. We want to get the United Kingdom rollout right first, confirm the safeguards hold up, and then we can expand from a better position.

A couple of things further out

This next part is a bit of a preview! So, the usual "subject to change" disclaimer applies.

One thing we want to build is Age Assured Groups, where you must be Age Assured 18+ to join. We think that'd be a big deal for communities. It's the kind of feature that comes after we've built out the foundation properly, which is part of why we're sequencing things the way we are: build the ecosystem first, then open up access.

Next up: tools like Content Gating can hide an avatar or a world. They can't stop someone from acting poorly or in bad faith. The hardest problems on any social platform aren't just about what avatars people wear, they're about how people behave. We told you in December we're going after that directly. We've been continuing to grow our Trust & Safety investment, tightening the gap between a report coming in and action going out, and building systems that reduce harm instead of just reacting to it.

As a part of that effort, we're also experimenting with a system aimed at one of the biggest, longest-running complaints about VRChat: toxicity and bad behavior in public instances. We're planning a dedicated post in July that gets into how it works, how we designed it, and how the experiment itself will run, including how you can take part.

We want to be as open as we can about the problems we're wrestling with and the thinking behind our approach. Part of the reason for this is that we've found that watching the community talk through this stuff has, more than once, shown us paths we hadn't thought of or that we'd written off.

We're listening

Building something like VRChat means that timelines can move. Priorities shift, things slip, and that's the honest reality of the work. It's also why we're not keen on handing out dates.

But, we do see what you're telling us. We read the feedback boards, Discord, social, the comments on our videos. We watch your TikTok shorts, your YouTube essays, your Twitch streams, all of it. We really appreciate everyone taking the time to tell us what's working and what's worrying you about this place on the internet we all call home, and we'll keep being as transparent as we can as we continue to grow and improve.