The rest of what we have written about Arizona. Every figure is quoted from Arizona’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders and restraining orders in Arizona
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 Arizona’s own statute, not summarized.
See a different stateArizona
Arizona's civil domestic-violence order is created by Arizona Revised Statutes (A.R.S.) section 13-3602, captioned on the Arizona State Legislature's own site "Order of protection; procedure; contents; arrest for violation; penalty; protection order from another jurisdiction; definition." It sits in Title 13 (the Criminal Code), not in a family-law title, which is itself worth noting for a reader coming from a divorce context. Arizona keeps a second, separate civil order for a person who does not have one of the relationships an Order of Protection requires: the Injunction Against Harassment, A.R.S. section 12-1809, described in its own section below.
Does this cover me?
Who can ask for one
Who may sign and file the petition (A.R.S. section 13-3602(A), read directly from the current live statute page and fully confirmed) is broad: the person themselves; a parent, legal guardian, or legal custodian on behalf of a minor; or a third party on behalf of a plaintiff who is temporarily or permanently unable to request the order themselves, subject to the judicial officer deciding the third party is appropriate. Any Arizona court may issue or enforce the order regardless of where the plaintiff or defendant is located. The relationship categories that make someone eligible for the order in the first place — current or former spouses or household members, co-parents, a pregnancy connecting the two people, a list of blood or in-law relatives, a child connected through a former spouse's household, or a current or former romantic or sexual relationship — come from a different, companion statute, A.R.S. section 13-3601, which we could not load directly from the legislature's live statute page (see blocked[] and the sourcing note above). Two additional things are confirmed directly from the live text of section 13-3602 itself: subsection B says an order "shall not be granted" unless the petition is written and verified, against a defendant under twelve unless the order is granted by the juvenile division of the superior court, or against more than one defendant.
What you have to show
Can I get something today?
order of protection issued without further hearing — before any hearing
This is the order a court can make without the other person present. It is short by design: it holds until a hearing, and the hearing is where the longer order is decided.
This is a structural point worth flagging clearly for a reader: unlike some states, Arizona's order of protection is not a two-stage "temporary order now, full hearing later" system by default. The order the court issues under subsection E, without a hearing, is not a separate short-term order — it is the order, effective on service and (per subsection N below) lasting up to two years. There is no hearing automatically scheduled. Instead, the defendant ("a party who is under an order of protection or who is restrained from contacting the other party") has the right to request one hearing at any point while the order is in effect, at which the court can modify, quash, or continue it. If requested, that hearing must be held within ten days, or within five days if the order gave one party exclusive use of the home. Filing fee: none. This is confirmed directly from the current, live statute text.
The order after a hearing
How long it lasts, and whether it can be extended
This is confirmed directly from the current, live text of section 13-3602 and is worth flagging prominently: an Arizona order of protection is valid for two years from the date it is served on the defendant, not one year. (Arizona's own court-system self-help materials — azcourthelp.org's "Things You Should Know About Protective Orders," consulted only for plain-language framing, never as a legal citation — confirm the two-year figure applies to orders served on or after September 24, 2022, and that orders served before that date ran for one year under the prior version of the law; that history was not independently verified against the statute's amendment history and is repeated here only as background, not as a sourced legal claim.) An order that is never served on the defendant expires after one year. We could not find a subsection anywhere in the confirmed structural map of section 13-3602 (subsections A through W) that provides for renewing or extending an order of protection the way Pennsylvania's and Ohio's statutes do; no such provision was located, so nothing is published for renewal or extension. A person whose protection is still needed as the two-year period runs out appears, from what we could confirm, to need to file a new petition rather than move to extend the existing order — but because we did not read every subsection of 13-3602 verbatim (only its topic map plus the specific subsections quoted throughout this page), this should be treated as an informed gap rather than a certainty, and a reader should confirm current practice with the court or an advocate.
What the judge can actually order
Wider than most people expect. In most states this list reaches the home, the children and money, not just distance.
The statutory list
Firearms
What Arizona’s own law says
This confirms the task's expectation that Arizona's approach is narrower than some other states': firearms prohibition and transfer are not automatic consequences of every order of protection. They apply only if the court makes an affirmative finding that the defendant "is a credible threat to the physical safety" of the plaintiff or other specifically designated persons. If that finding is made, the mechanism is fairly direct — transfer to "the appropriate law enforcement agency," immediately after service or within twenty-four hours at the latest — but section 13-3602 does not contain the kind of extended relinquishment machinery (third-party safekeeping, licensed-dealer consignment, a dedicated registry, abandonment procedures) that Pennsylvania's statute has. We did not find, and did not go looking for, any separate Arizona firearms-relinquishment statute outside of section 13-3602 itself, so this page covers only what the order-of-protection statute itself provides.
▸ See how this compares — all 50 states, side by side
What it costs
Fees
Confirmed directly from the current, live statute text: no fee for filing the petition or for service of process, and courts must supply the forms free of charge. Subsection L, quoted above, separately confirms no fee for the restrained party to request the one hearing they are entitled to.
If they break it
What a violation is, and what it carries
Worth knowing about Arizona
A few things are worth a reader's attention beyond the core provisions above. First, the two-year duration: many people assume protective orders last a year, and Arizona's own did until a law change; the current statute (confirmed directly from the live text) runs the order two years from the date of service, with a one-year window to get it served in the first place. Second, Arizona's firearms provision is conditional, not automatic — it requires a specific judicial finding that the defendant is a "credible threat," unlike states that order relinquishment as a matter of course whenever an order issues. Third, Arizona does not appear to give the order of protection statute its own renewal or extension mechanism the way Pennsylvania and Ohio do; a person who still needs protection as the two-year period ends should not assume the order renews itself. Fourth, and important for anyone without a qualifying relationship: Arizona's order of protection under section 13-3602 only reaches people connected by marriage, a former marriage, a shared household, a shared child, a specified blood or in-law relationship, or a current or former romantic or sexual relationship. Someone being harassed or stalked by a stranger, coworker, neighbor, or acquaintance outside those categories instead uses a different order, the Injunction Against Harassment under A.R.S. section 12-1809, summarized below. Separately, and outside the scope of the order-of-protection statute itself: Arizona enacted a significant new domestic-violence-related family-court law in 2026, House Bill 2995 (the "Alec and Lydia Act," chaptered as 2026 session law chapter 263), which amends A.R.S. section 25-403.03 — the child-custody and parenting-time statute — to add mandatory presumptions and evidentiary standards around domestic violence in custody decisions. That bill does not amend section 13-3602 or 13-3601 themselves, so it does not change anything reported above, but it is directly relevant to a divorce-navigation reader dealing with both a protective order and a custody case, and is flagged here as a pointer rather than researched in full.
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.
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 Arizona Legislature’s own statute pages (azleg.gov) — we could not read A.R.S. s. 13-3601 (the definition of domestic violence, which sets the qualifying relationships), s. 13-2810 (interfering with judicial proceedings, which carries the classification for violating an order), or s. 12-1809 (injunction against harassment, the route for people without a qualifying relationship). Every attempt, in both the plain and document-viewer forms of the address, returned only a JavaScript redirect notice rather than the statute. The same was true of the 2026 session-law chapter enacting House Bill 2995; we located and read the bill’s own engrossed text instead.
- An Arizona Legislative Council reference PDF listing statutes classified as misdemeanours, which looked likely to state s. 13-2810’s classification directly, would not fetch either.
- The Arizona court system’s plain-language protective-order guide on azpoint.azcourts.gov was refused outright by its robots file. We used the same document as published elsewhere.
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 Arizona presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.