The rest of what we have written about Alaska. Every figure is quoted from Alaska’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders and restraining orders in Alaska
Who can ask for one, what you have to show, what a judge can order, what it costs, and what happens if it is broken — quoted from Alaska’s own statutes, not summarized.
See a different stateAlaska
Alaska issues protective orders under chapter 18.66 of the statutes. A short-term order can be made without the other person present, and a long-term protective order follows a hearing. What is distinctive here is the duration, and it is genuinely unusual: one provision of an Alaska order never expires, while the rest run for a year. That division, and the unusually generous window for extending, are dealt with first below.
The order after a hearing
One provision never expires. The rest run a year.
Alaska splits its long-term protective order in a way that works powerfully in a protected person’s favor, and it is not something most people are told.
Subsection (c)(1) is the core prohibition — the order not to threaten or commit domestic violence against you. That provision does not expire. Not in a year, not in five. It stays in force until a court makes a different order.
Everything else — the no-contact terms, exclusion from the residence, staying away from your workplace or school, the weapons prohibition, custody, and the rest of subsections (c)(2) through (c)(16) — is "effective for one year unless earlier dissolved by court order".
So an Alaska order has a permanent spine and a one-year body. The practical instruction follows directly: the parts of your order that actually govern day-to-day life are the parts with the clock on them. Diary the expiry date the day you receive the order.
Extending — and the sixty days afterwards
Alaska’s extension window is unusually generous, and it is worth knowing precisely because most states give you nothing at all once an order has lapsed.
A petitioner may seek an extension within 30 days before the order expires or within 60 days after it has expired. An extension runs a further year where the court finds it necessary to protect the petitioner.
That sixty-day tail is a genuine safety net. If you have missed the date, in most of the country that means starting the whole process again. In Alaska it does not, provided you move within two months.
What the judge can actually order
The statutory relief
A long-term order may prohibit contact; exclude the respondent from the residence; restrict their access to your workplace or school; prohibit possession of weapons; award temporary custody; require participation in a domestic violence intervention program; and order payment of costs and reimbursement of expenses.
The reimbursement provision is one people routinely fail to claim. Costs you have incurred because of the abuse are within what the court can order the respondent to repay. Bring the receipts.
Penalties for violating an Alaska protective order
This offense is not in the domestic violence chapter. It is in the criminal code, at AS 11.56.740, and knowing that saves you looking in the wrong place — a mistake we had made on this page ourselves until we checked.
AS 11.56.740
A person commits the offense if, being subject to a protective order, they knowingly commit or attempt to commit an act that violates a provision of the order. For orders under AS 18.66 — the domestic violence chapter this page is about — the statute reaches an act done “with reckless disregard that the act violates or would violate a provision” of the order.
“Violation of this section is a class A misdemeanor.” (AS 11.56.740(b))
A class A misdemeanor is the most serious misdemeanor grade in Alaska. The mental element is worth reading twice: for a domestic violence order it is enough that the person acted with reckless disregard as to whether the act broke the order. They do not have to have known for certain that it did. “I did not think that counted” is not, on the face of the statute, an answer.
The section also covers orders made under other chapters — stalking and sexual assault protective orders under AS 18.65.850–18.65.867, and guardianship-related orders under AS 13.26.450–13.26.460 — so it is the single violation offense across Alaska’s protective order types.
Does this cover me? Alaska’s definitions
The structure, and why it is unusual
Alaska does not define domestic violence by describing abusive behavior in general terms. It defines it by reference to a list of criminal offenses at AS 18.66.990 — crimes against the person, arson, criminal mischief, burglary, criminal trespass, violating a protective order, harassment and others — committed by one household member against another.
The practical consequence is that the question “does what happened to me count?” is really the question “would what happened to me be one of those offenses?” You do not need a charge, a prosecution or a conviction — the conduct simply has to fall within the definition of one of the listed crimes.
“Household member” in Alaska is correspondingly broad, reaching adults and minors who are related or formerly related by marriage, who live or have lived together, who have a child in common, who are or have been in a dating or sexual relationship, and adults related as parents, children, siblings or grandparents.
Why we are describing rather than quoting here
We could not open the section of the Alaska Statutes containing these definitions on a source we trust, so we have described the structure rather than printed a list we have not read in full. That is a deliberate choice: the shape of Alaska’s definition is the thing worth knowing, and a half-verified list of offense names would be worse than none.
If your situation turns on whether a particular relationship or a particular act is inside the definition, that is a question for the clerk or an advocate, and it is a question they answer often. The Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, and the 24-hour national hotline listed at the top of this page, can both point you to someone local.
Firearms in Alaska: real, but conditional — and not at the emergency stage
Alaska’s provision is in the domestic violence chapter where you would expect it. What makes it easy to miss is that it is not automatic: it turns on a specific finding the judge has to make, and it is unavailable on an ex parte order.
The two provisions — AS 18.66.100(c)(6) and (7)
Subsection (c) opens “A protective order under this section may …” — permissive throughout. Two of the paragraphs concern weapons:
“prohibit the respondent from using or possessing a deadly weapon if the court finds the respondent was in the actual possession of or used a weapon during the commission of domestic violence”
“direct the respondent to surrender any firearm owned or possessed by the respondent if the court finds that the respondent was in the actual possession of or used a firearm during the commission of the domestic violence”
The condition is the thing to understand
Neither paragraph is triggered by the protective order itself. Both require a predicate finding that a weapon was actually possessed or used during the domestic violence. So a respondent who committed domestic violence without a weapon can be subject to a full long-term Alaska order and face no state firearms consequence at all.
Note also the narrowing between the two. Paragraph (6) covers deadly weapons on a weapon predicate. Paragraph (7) covers firearms on a firearm predicate. A finding that a knife was used supports (6) but not (7) — it can bar possession without compelling surrender.
What follows for you is concrete. If a weapon was present, say so explicitly in your petition and again at the hearing, and ask the court to make the finding in those words. It is the finding, not the order, that unlocks both paragraphs. If a firearm specifically was involved, say firearm — the word matters.
Neither is available on an emergency order
This is explicit, and it is the most important line on this page for anyone in the first twenty days. AS 18.66.110(a) says an ex parte protective order “may grant the protection provided by AS 18.66.100(c)(1) — (5), (8) — (12), and (16).”
Read the numbers. (6) and (7) are the only paragraphs missing from that list. The gap is not an accident of drafting; the weapons paragraphs are deliberately carved out of ex parte relief.
So an Alaska twenty-day ex parte order carries no weapons relief whatsoever — and the federal prohibition does not apply either, because there has been no hearing. That window is unprotected on both fronts. AS 18.66.100(b) requires the court to set the hearing with at least ten days’ notice to the respondent, so the gap is real and it is measured in weeks.
Authority without machinery
Where the court does order surrender under (c)(7), the statute stops there. There is no deadline, no designated recipient, and no certification or receipt requirement — and the Alaska Court System’s own published guide to protective orders supplies none either.
That puts Alaska with West Virginia, Alabama and Maryland: a court that can order the guns handed over, and no apparatus behind the order. Ask the judge to write a specific handover time and a named recipient into the order. Where the statute is silent, the terms the judge writes are all the enforcement there is.
Penalties, and one Alaska offense worth knowing
Violating a protective order is a class A misdemeanor under AS 11.56.740, as set out earlier on this page.
There is also a felony that surprises people, at AS 11.61.200(a)(8): misconduct involving weapons in the third degree, a class C felony, committed by a person who criminally trespasses in violation of a protective order while possessing a defensive or deadly weapon. Coming to your door in breach of the order is a misdemeanor; coming armed is a felony.
We should be precise about what that section is not. AS 11.61.200 contains no status-based possession ban keyed to a protective order, and no equivalent of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8). It is a trespass-plus-weapon offense. If a source cites it as Alaska’s version of the federal rule, that is wrong.
Concealed carry
AS 18.65.705(2) requires a permit applicant to be “eligible to own or possess a handgun under the laws of this state and under federal law.” There is no protective-order paragraph of Alaska’s own — the disqualification runs entirely through that federal hook, so it reaches someone under a qualifying post-hearing order.
It is self-executing on an existing permit: under AS 18.65.735 the department “shall immediately suspend a permit … if a permittee becomes ineligible”, with revocation under AS 18.65.740(1). Alaska is a permitless-carry state, so the permit consequence has limited practical weight — but a federally prohibited person cannot lawfully possess at all.
One gap worth naming
Alaska’s stalking and sexual assault protective orders, under AS 18.65.850, have no weapons provision at all and no cross-reference to AS 18.66.100(c). That relief exists only on the domestic violence track. If you are proceeding under the stalking route, this section does not help you.
▸ See how this compares — all 50 states, side by side
The part that is the same in every state
An order from one state works in all of them
This is federal law and it does not change at a state line. An order issued by one state, tribe or territory must be enforced by every other as if that state had issued it. And you do not have to register it in the new state first — registration is optional, not a precondition to enforcement.
The same section also says the enforcing state must not tell the restrained person that the order has been registered there unless the protected person asks it to, and must not publish anything online that would be likely to reveal the protected person’s identity or location.
The federal firearms rule needs a hearing first
This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole subject, and it cuts against what most people assume. The federal prohibition at 18 U.S.C. s. 922(g)(8) reaches a person subject to an order only where three things are true: the order was made after a hearing of which they had actual notice and at which they had a chance to take part; it restrains them in relation to an intimate partner or that partner’s child; and it either carries a credible-threat finding or expressly forbids the use of force.
So an emergency or ex parte order does not trigger the federal prohibition on its own — there has been no hearing yet. State law may go further, and many states do, which is why the state rule is set out on this page separately. In United States v. Rahimi (2024) the Supreme Court upheld s. 922(g)(8), holding that “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
This rule is narrower than it looks, and the detail matters. Who counts as an “intimate partner” is a defined term that excludes dating partners you never lived with; the two halves of the third condition are not equally settled after Rahimi; and there is a separate federal route based on convictions rather than orders, which does reach dating partners. We set all of it out, quoted from the United States Code, on one page: Guns and protection orders — the federal rule.
How does this state compare? Ten states do nothing at all about firearms on a protection order; fourteen prohibit possession but give the court no way to collect them. All fifty side by side: which states actually take the guns.
You should not be charged for this — in any state
This is settled, and it is worth knowing before you walk into a courthouse. Under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450, a state applying for STOP grant funding must certify to the Attorney General that its "laws, policies, and practices do not require" a victim to bear the costs associated with the filing, issuance, registration, modification, enforcement, dismissal, withdrawal or service of a protection order or a petition for one — nor the costs of filing criminal charges, or of warrants and witness subpoenas. A jurisdiction that does charge has its funds withheld and redistributed to the states that do not.
Every state receives STOP funding and every state has certified compliance. The practical consequence, in the words of the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit, is that victims "should not be required to pay such costs in any state". That covers having the papers served on the other person, which is the charge people are most often asked for.
Two honest qualifications. The provision does not stop a court charging the respondent — many states order costs against them, and that is permitted. And it is a funding condition rather than a direct federal ban, so what a clerk does on a given day can still be wrong. If you are asked to pay a fee for any of the things listed above, you can say that your state has certified under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450 that it does not charge for them. Advocates can also raise it with the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit on 1-800-903-0111, prompt 2.
Where this state’s own statute says so expressly, that is quoted above.
Authority: Alaska Stat. ch. 18.66, "Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault." Protective orders, eligible petitioners, relief and duration at s. 18.66.100. Specific protective orders at s. 18.66.130. The offense of violating a protective order is not in ch. 18.66 — it is at AS 11.56.740, in the criminal code. Checked 29 Aug 2026.
How we checked this page
Every quotation on this page was read in the source named in the Authority line above, not taken from a summary or another website. On this date we also re-checked every section cited for repeal, renumbering or amendment since 2024 — the sweep that caught North Dakota’s chapter being repealed and replaced, and Nebraska’s moving to an entirely new title.
What we could not do, and would rather say so than paper over:
- The Alaska Legislature’s own statute pages at akleg.gov would not open for us, and the federal firearms authority’s Alaska compilation returned a 404. The provisions above were read across four independent reproductions that agree word for word, and confirmed against the Alaska Court System’s own published guide to protective orders. We are confident in them, but we could not check them against the state’s primary source, so we cannot rule out a very recent amendment.
- The definitions section, AS 18.66.990 — we could not open it on a source we trust, so we describe its structure above rather than printing the list of offenses and relationship categories verbatim.
What we cannot promise is that nothing has changed since this date. Quote the words with confidence; check a section number before you put it in a filing. And if anything here does not match what a clerk or judge tells you, the court is right and we are wrong — tell us and we will fix it.
We keep a public record of every time we have got the law wrong on these pages, what caused it, and how long it was live: where we were wrong.
If there are children
What Alaska presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.