But right now, the rules change at the state line. Every state below shows what we found on minors' access to indoor tanning, sourced to the actual statute where we could get to it — and clearly labeled where we couldn't, rather than guessed.
Click or tap a state.
This pass covers one thing well: whether, and how, a state restricts commercial tanning-device use by minors (our map merges the "under-18 restrictions" and "parental-consent exceptions" categories below, since in practice a state's law is usually one rule that answers both). The five categories below it — facility regulation, licensing, inspection, enforcement, and misleading commercial claims — get an honest national-level summary of what we found, not a 50-state audit. Verifying those state by state is real, separate legal research; we didn't fabricate it to look finished.
Every youth-access statute we pulled this pass that goes beyond a bare age rule also bundles in equipment-adjacent requirements at the same time: required warning statements read or signed before first use (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah), mandatory protective eyewear (Alabama, Mississippi, Nebraska, Utah), and in-person or notarized consent so it can't be phoned in (Alabama, Florida, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina). We haven't separately audited equipment-safety or operator-training rules state by state.
Several states run tanning facilities through a state or local public-health permitting program, similar to a restaurant or pool inspection: Illinois, Iowa, Florida, and New York all publish tanning-facility permit programs through their health departments, and some cities (Saint Paul, MN) license facilities separately from the state. A full state-by-state licensing map — which states require a facility license at all, and which leave it to the locality — hasn't been built yet.
Illinois DPH, Iowa DIAL, Florida DOH, and New York DOH facility-permitting pages.
Where we saw it, inspection is handled as a standard public-health facility inspection, not a tanning-specific regime — Massachusetts, for instance, regulates tanning-facility inspections under the same code chapter (105 CMR 123) that sets its age rule. We don't yet have inspection frequency or practice for most states.
The best evidence we have isn't a legal citation, it's a compliance study: a 2018 secret-shopper audit of 427 tanning salons across states with youth-access laws found 37.2% noncompliance — operators letting an underage shopper tan without following their own state's consent rule. That's the clearest signal so far that a law on the books and a law that's followed are two different things, and it's why this category can't responsibly be marked complete just because a statute exists.
Williams MS, et al. JAMA Dermatol 2018;154(1):67-72 — PubMed 29071349
This is handled, where it exists at all, through general consumer-protection authority rather than a tanning-specific rule — Georgia's Attorney General Consumer Protection Division, for example, publishes tanning-specific guidance addressing salon marketing claims. We haven't checked whether other states' consumer-protection offices do the same.
Georgia Attorney General, Consumer Protection Division — Tanning
Assembled from state statutes and agency pages where cited, and from the American Academy of Dermatology's indoor-tanning summary (aad.org/media/stats-indoor-tanning, reviewed 2/11/25) and the AIM at Melanoma Foundation's 2023 legislative summary where a primary source wasn't independently pulled this pass. If you have a verified, sourced correction for any state, get in touch and we'll fix it.