The rest of what we have written about Montana. Every figure is quoted from Montana’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders and restraining orders in Montana
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 Montana’s own statutes, not summarized.
See a different stateMontana
Montana issues orders of protection under chapter 15 of title 40. A temporary order can be made without the other person present, and a longer order follows a hearing. Montana is unusual in setting no standard term at all: an order runs for whatever period the court directs, or it can be made permanent. What decides which is the evidence put in front of the court, and that is dealt with first below.
The order after a hearing
An appropriate time, or permanent
Montana does not set a standard term at all. It hands the question to the court, and it puts permanence expressly on the menu.
There is no one year, no two years, no ceiling to work within. An order of protection in Montana runs for whatever period the court directs — or it does not run out at all.
In deciding whether an order should remain in effect permanently, the court looks at the respondent’s history of violence, the severity of the offense, and the evidence put before it.
That last phrase is the operative one. All three factors are things you put in front of the court, and the first two are matters of record that a judge will not know unless someone produces them. If permanence is what you need, ask for it and bring the history. A court choosing an "appropriate time period" with no material about the respondent’s past is choosing in the dark.
What the order itself must say
The warning on the face of the document
Every Montana order must display, conspicuously, a warning about the criminal penalties for violating it, and this:
That sentence is worth knowing about for a specific reason. A common tactic is to tell a protected person that an order has been dropped, changed or is no longer in force — sometimes by the respondent, sometimes sincerely by someone who has misunderstood. It has not been. Only a court can change it, and until a court does, the order says what it says.
Does this cover me?
Two routes in — and one does not depend on the relationship at all
Montana’s eligibility section has two halves, and the second is the one people miss.
The first route is for partners and family members. You are eligible if you are "in reasonable apprehension of bodily injury" by a partner or family member, or if you are the victim of one of a list of offenses committed by a partner or family member — assault, aggravated assault, intimidation, criminal endangerment, strangulation, unlawful restraint, kidnapping and arson among them.
Note that the first limb does not require anything to have happened yet. Reasonable apprehension of bodily injury is enough.
The second route has no relationship requirement whatsoever.
A victim of any of those offenses may petition regardless of their relationship to the offender, and the same is true for victims of incest, sexual assault, sexual intercourse without consent, sexual abuse of children, and human trafficking. Partners and family members of homicide victims are also eligible.
So in Montana the question "does this cover me" is not answered by working out what the other person is to you. If one of those offenses has been committed against you, a stranger qualifies as readily as a spouse.
A parent, guardian ad litem or representative may file on behalf of a minor. For an adult who is incapacitated, a guardian, conservator or agent may petition.
If they break it
What a violation carries
Notice how the wording shifts. On a first offense the court may impose a fine or imprisonment. From the second offense onward the statute says fined and imprisoned, with a floor under each — 24 hours on the second, ten days on the third, and the possibility of state prison rather than county jail.
That conjunction is doing real work: after the first violation, a Montana court cannot deal with a breach by fine alone.
This connects to the duration section above. The respondent’s history of violence is one of the things a court weighs in deciding whether to make an order permanent — so a prosecuted violation both carries its own penalty and strengthens the case for an order with no end date.
The Montana timetable — and a mandatory issuance rule
§ 40-15-201: the court shall issue
The standard is that the petitioner “is in danger of harm if the court does not act immediately” — and once the court makes that finding, issuance is mandatory: the statute says the court shall issue the temporary order of protection, not that it may.
An ex parte order made without prior notice lasts up to 20 days, and the hearing is set within 20 days. A continuance for good cause is permitted with the temporary order remaining in effect.
One provision runs the other way and is worth knowing about: the respondent may force an emergency hearing within three working days. If you are served with notice of such a hearing, that is a very short window — gather what you have and contact an advocate the same day.
What a Montana order can contain
The relief in § 40-15-201(2) includes restraining contact and threats; a distance term keeping the respondent “1,500 feet or other appropriate distance away from the petitioner, the petitioner’s residence, the school or place of employment of the petitioner, or any specified place frequented by the petitioner”; “removing and excluding the respondent from the residence of the petitioner, regardless of ownership of the residence”; and a restraint on transferring, encumbering, concealing or disposing of property, with a duty to notify you through the court of any proposed extraordinary expenditure.
Note the 1,500 feet. That is roughly three city blocks and is more generous than the 500-foot terms common elsewhere — and the statute lets the court substitute another appropriate distance, so ask for what you actually need.
Firearms in Montana: there is a provision, and it does almost nothing
§ 40-15-201(2)(f), in full
“prohibiting the respondent from possessing or using the firearm used in the assault”
That is the entire firearms content of Montana’s protection order law, and every word of it is a limit. It is discretionary, not mandatory. It reaches one specific weapon — the one used in the assault — not the respondent’s firearms generally. It presupposes a firearm was used at all, so it does nothing in a case that did not involve one. There is no ammunition provision, no general possession ban, and no surrender or relinquishment procedure anywhere in the chapter.
We searched all four parts of chapter 40-15, twenty-eight sections, for firearm, weapon, ammunition and surrender. Besides that clause the only other hits were a restatement of the same clause inside the mandatory victim-notice script at § 40-15-103, and a reference in § 40-15-102 to “assault with a weapon” as a qualifying predicate offense. Section 40-15-202 has no firearms language at all — so nothing further attaches at the final order stage that did not attach at the temporary one.
The practical upshot is the same as in the states with no provision at all: the meaningful firearms protection in Montana comes from 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which attaches to a final order made after a hearing where the federal conditions are met. Ask for the credible-threat finding.
▸ 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: Mont. Code Ann. tit. 40, ch. 15, "Partner and Family Member Assault, Sexual Assault, and Stalking — Victim Protection." Eligibility at s. 40-15-102. Definitions at s. 40-15-116. Orders of protection, hearings and evidence at s. 40-15-202. Written orders of protection and duration at s. 40-15-204. Violation of an order of protection at s. 45-5-626. Checked 29 Aug 2026.
How we checked this page
Every quotation above was read in the source named in the Authority line, not taken from a summary or another website. Where a source would not open, we say so at the point we relied on something else.
On this date we also re-checked every section cited above for repeal, renumbering or amendment since 2024. That sweep is not decorative: it is what caught North Dakota’s protection order chapter being repealed and replaced, Nebraska’s moving to an entirely new title, and a dozen 2025 and 2026 amendments that most published guidance has not yet picked up.
Nothing is outstanding on the main questions for Montana. 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 Montana presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.