License plate changes, smartphone filters: All these new Utah laws will go into effect in 2025

SALT LAKE CITY — It’s been months since Utah lawmakers met on Capitol Hill, but several new laws passed in the last year will become official when the new year rings in on Wednesday.

Related: Northern Utah road construction projects wrapping up in 2025

From changes to license plate requirements to smartphone protections for children, here are all of the new laws taking effect on the first day of 2025:

License plates and vehicle registrations

License plates have been one of the most frequently addressed topics in the Utah Legislature in recent years, with lawmakers running a series of bills creating specialty license plates honoring the Great Salt Lake, promoting suicide prevention and commemorating the state’s Dark Sky Initiative. With SB45, Sen. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, and Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, approved an omnibus license plate bill that creates a board to review the approval of new license plates, while making a series of other changes to license plate laws.

Beginning Wednesday, most private vehicle owners will no longer be required to have a front license plate, and the government will no longer issue two plates to those who register vehicles. Commercial vehicles will still be required to display both license plates.

“(The bill) arguably reduces the scope of government by 50% to a degree on all of our vehicles by cutting in half the number of license plates that need to be issued by the Motor Vehicle Division, as well as … eliminating the requirement that you have a front license plate,” Eliason said when presenting the bill on the House floor.

The cost of registering vehicles will be reduced to account for the elimination of the front license plate, with half the cost being returned to the taxpayer and the rest being distributed to the state’s fund on highway safety.

The state’s registration decal system — which currently requires separate decals for the month and the year — will also be consolidated into one decal that signifies the month and year of registration.

Eliason said Utah is one of the last remaining states that stamps license plates, and said the bill allows for digital printing of license plates, which will make it easier and cheaper for the state to print new designs. He said new designs currently need 500 drivers to sign on before it is worth the investment to the state. With digital printing, the state will be able to fulfill smaller orders for new and specialty plates.

“This is going to move us into a modern age of license plate production technology,” Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, said. “It will allow our license plates by purpose to be more beautiful because they will have had somebody who knows what they’re doing help with the design. They’ll be prettier, they’ll be modern, they’ll look great.”

Other vehicle changes include HB184, which allows drivers of off-road vehicles and boats to show proof of registration in the form of a digital copy or photograph of the registration card; and HB441, which lets owners of novel, street-legal vehicles to register them with the state in order to operate the vehicles on state lands.

Business regulations

As part of the Legislature’s ongoing attempts to protect young Utahns online, Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, passed a bill in 2024 that requires manufacturers of smartphones and tablets to enable “obscenity filters” on devices used by children. Many devices already have such filters installed, but they are often not enabled upon purchase.

The Children’s Device Protection Act allows the attorney general to sue device manufacturers who are deemed out of compliance with the law.

“The idea is to provide minors with protection and opportunities that they deserve as children to protect them from developing maybe an addiction to pornography before they’re even adults and allow them time to develop good online habits while they’re still young,” Weiler said in January.

Rep. Cheryl Acton, R-West Jordan, sponsored a consumer protection bill to address subscriptions and free trials that renew automatically. HB174 requires companies to notify consumers when a free trial ends and tell them how to cancel. It requires similar notice before subscriptions renew but applies only to irregular or long-term subscriptions that don’t renew on a monthly basis.

The policy applies only to businesses that sell subscriptions to the general public, not business-to-business sales.

“We’ve all been in that situation, probably, where something renewed unexpectedly. Some of them can be very expensive,” Acton said. “It applies to renewals that don’t happen every month, so it’s not a hassle either. That wouldn’t be convenient to receive notice that it’s going to renew if it renews every month.”

“It’s a consumer protection bill really for all of us, but especially for the elderly and for others who may not be really proactively watching for these renewals and able to navigate phone trees, etc., to cancel,” she added.

Lawmakers also addressed business regulation by raising the amount of THC in industrial hemp products that companies can transport in the state with HB52, standardizing statewide regulations for stormwater monitoring on construction sites through HB507, and prohibiting the use of certain foreign-made drones over critical infrastructure sites with SB135.

Get the full story at ksl.com.