The rest of what we have written about Pennsylvania. Every figure is quoted from Pennsylvania’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders and restraining orders in Pennsylvania
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 Pennsylvania’s own statute, not summarized.
See a different statePennsylvania
Pennsylvania's civil domestic-violence order is called a Protection From Abuse order, created by 23 Pa.C.S. Chapter 61 (the Protection from Abuse Act, 23 Pa.C.S. §§ 6101-6122). It is only available where the person seeking it and the person named have one of the relationships listed in the Act's definition of 'family or household members' (quoted below). A person being harmed by someone outside that relationship list — a stranger, a coworker, a casual date, a landlord — cannot get a PFA and instead has to look to a second, separate law: 42 Pa.C.S. Chapter 62A, the Protection of Victims of Sexual Violence or Intimidation Act, summarized in its own section below. The two laws are administered under different chapters of different titles of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes and use different court forms.
The short version8 points · tap one to jump to it
- Does this cover me?
- Can I get something today? — This is the order a court can make without the other person present.
- The order after a hearing — The three-year maximum is confirmed directly from the statute, not just the court system's paraphrase.
- What the judge can actually order — In most states this list reaches the home, the children and money, not just distance.
- Firearms — Section 6108(a)(7) also reaches any firearm license the defendant holds under 23 Pa.C.S. section 6108 and requires it be relinquished alongside the firearms themselves.
- What it costs
- Worth knowing about Pennsylvania
- The part that is the same in every state — This is federal law and it does not change at a state line.
In this subject 8
Does this cover me?
The short version8 points · tap one to jump to it
- Does this cover me?
- Can I get something today? — This is the order a court can make without the other person present.
- The order after a hearing — The three-year maximum is confirmed directly from the statute, not just the court system's paraphrase.
- What the judge can actually order — In most states this list reaches the home, the children and money, not just distance.
- Firearms — Section 6108(a)(7) also reaches any firearm license the defendant holds under 23 Pa.C.S. section 6108 and requires it be relinquished alongside the firearms themselves.
- What it costs
- Worth knowing about Pennsylvania
- The part that is the same in every state — This is federal law and it does not change at a state line.
In this subject 8
Who can ask for one
The relationship categories above (23 Pa.C.S. section 6102) set who a PFA can be sought against. Section 6106(a), now confirmed verbatim on the General Assembly's own site, sets who may sign and file the petition: an adult or emancipated minor for themselves; a parent, adult household member, or guardian ad litem on behalf of a minor child; or a guardian on behalf of an adult who has been declared incompetent. Section 6106 also requires no-cost filing for the plaintiff (see fee below) and, separately, makes it an offense under 18 Pa.C.S. section 4906 to knowingly give false information to implicate someone under this chapter.
What you have to show
Can I get something today?
temporary order — 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.
Section 6107(a) requires the full hearing within ten business days of filing. A temporary, ex parte order under 6107(b) requires the plaintiff to allege "immediate and present danger of abuse" to the plaintiff or minor children, and stays in effect until the hearing rather than expiring on a fixed clock of its own. The court can also, at this ex parte stage, order the defendant to temporarily relinquish firearms if the petition shows abuse involving a firearm or other weapon, or an immediate and present danger of abuse assessed against a list of factors the statute itself sets out (a prior violation of a PFA order, injury, public abuse, threats of suicide or of killing pets, escalation, stalking, sexual violence, or drug or excessive alcohol use). Outside normal court hours, 23 Pa.C.S. section 6110 lets a petition go before a hearing officer, who may grant relief limited to sections 6108(a)(1), (2), (6), and in some cases (9.1) — no-abuse, exclusion from the residence, and no-contact, but not the fuller custody, support, or firearms relief a judge can order after the full hearing — "if the hearing officer deems it necessary to protect the plaintiff or minor children from abuse upon good cause shown in an ex parte proceeding," where "immediate and present danger of abuse to the plaintiff or minor children shall constitute good cause." That order expires "at the end of the next business day the court deems itself available," and is then reviewed by the court.
The order after a hearing
How long it lasts, and whether it can be extended
The three-year maximum is confirmed directly from the statute, not just the court system's paraphrase. Extension is not automatic: it requires a new petition and hearing, and the court must find either a new act of abuse since the order, or a pattern showing continued risk (extraordinarily, an incarcerated defendant's release also supports an extension without needing to show a new act). There is no cap on the number of extensions.
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 Pennsylvania’s own law says
A defendant ordered to relinquish firearms under a PFA has three routes: hand them to the sheriff or appropriate law enforcement agency; sell or transfer them through a licensed dealer under section 6108.2 (the dealer may charge a reasonable fee, and must obtain a sworn affidavit that the firearm will not be sold or transferred back to the defendant or to anyone in the defendant's household while the order is active); or relinquish them to a vetted third party under section 6108.3, who must be found by the sheriff not to be prohibited from possessing firearms and must sign an affidavit agreeing not to return them or give the defendant access while the order is active, on a safekeeping permit issued at no cost. Section 6108(a)(7) also reaches any firearm license the defendant holds under 23 Pa.C.S. section 6108 and requires it be relinquished alongside the firearms themselves. We could not reach the operative text of 23 Pa.C.S. section 6105 (Responsibilities of law enforcement agencies) or of 42 Pa.C.S. section 6114 (contempt penalties for a violation, which can include a firearms violation); see the gaps note at the bottom of this page. Separately, 18 Pa.C.S. section 6105 — a different section, in a different title, dealing with who may not possess firearms under Pennsylvania's Crimes Code — and the federal firearms prohibition at 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(8) both interact with a PFA order; section 6107(a) requires the court to advise a defendant of both at the hearing notice stage. The federal layer at the bottom of this page covers 922(g)(8) generally.
What it costs
Fees
That sentence is from the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania's own page on protection orders (pacourts.us), not from the statute itself; we could not reach 23 Pa.C.S. section 6106(b), where the no-fee rule is expected to be codified, during this research session (see blocked[]). A second, independent official source corroborates the same rule without quoting the statute's own sentence: a Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules document hosted on the court system's site, describing a change to the standard PFA final-order form, states that the form was "amended to reflect the statute's prohibition against charging the plaintiff fees or costs related to filing, service, registration or appeal in any Protection From Abuse matter." Both sources agree that filing and service are free to the person seeking protection; neither is the statute's own wording.
Worth knowing about Pennsylvania
Two things are worth flagging even with the gaps noted below. First, the table of contents alone shows how much weight Pennsylvania's Protection From Abuse Act puts on firearms: seven consecutive sections (6108 through 6108.7) deal with relief, relinquishment, safekeeping, third-party transfer, a firearm-ownership registry, penalties for misusing that registry's information, a penalty for failing to secure a firearm, and sealing the record — a level of statutory detail on firearms that most states do not have. Second, Pennsylvania keeps its sexual-violence and stalking protective order completely separate from its family-violence order: a person who cannot show one of the relationships in 23 Pa.C.S. section 6102's "family or household members" definition does not get a weaker version of a PFA, they get a different order under a different title of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes (42 Pa.C.S. Chapter 62A), described below.
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 “[a]n individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another 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:
- Pennsylvania was the hardest state on this site to source. The General Assembly’s own statute pages refused every attempt — more than five each, spread across the session and retried after waits — with the same robots.txt error, on both the older legis.state.pa.us domain and the newer palegis.us one. The sections we could never read are the heart of the Protection From Abuse Act: s. 6105 (responsibilities of law enforcement, relevant to firearms at the scene), s. 6106 (who may file, and the no-fee rule), s. 6108 (relief, including maximum final-order duration and extension), s. 6108.2 (relinquishment for consignment sale, lawful transfer or safekeeping), s. 6110 (emergency relief by the minor judiciary, the after-hours route) and s. 6114 (contempt for violation, and its penalties). We also could not read 42 Pa.C.S. s. 62A13, part of the Protection of Victims of Sexual Violence or Intimidation Act, nor 231 Pa. Code Chapter 1900, the procedural rule governing these actions.
- What that means for you: this is the state where you should lean hardest on the clerk and on a local advocate rather than on any website, ours included. Where this page states a Pennsylvania figure, we found it in a source we could open, and we say so at the point we use it — but we could not check it against the Commonwealth’s own text.
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 Pennsylvania presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.