Filial Responsibility Laws by U.S. Jurisdiction (2026): statute, scope, and enforcement

Whether each of the 51 U.S. jurisdictions imposes a duty on an adult child to support an indigent parent - statute, citation, scope, and whether it is actually enforced - read from state primary sources on 2026-08-03. Verification is carried in the data. A row is stated definitively only where confidence is high AND the state's own current code was read directly: 26 of 51 rows meet that bar. The rest are published with their status and the reason stated. The unverified rows skew toward absence findings, because proving a statute does not exist requires searching a whole code - which is what a Lexis-gated, JavaScript-only, 403 or SSL-broken official site prevents. Findings: 21 jurisdictions have a statute by this reading. Pennsylvania is the only one with documented recent enforcement against an adult child (HCR v. Pittas, 46 A.3d 719 (Pa. Super. 2012), allocatur denied) - an intermediate appellate decision that is binding only in Pennsylvania and merely persuasive elsewhere, though it is routinely cited as a national rule. Montana (2021), Utah (2024), Maryland (2017), Maine and Idaho have repealed theirs and still appear on circulated lists.