Age of consent in the United States

In the United States, each state and territory sets the age of consent either by statute or the common law applies, and there are several federal statutes related to protecting minors from sexual predators. Depending on the jurisdiction, the legal age of consent is between 16 and 18. Many states also include close-in-age exemptions, which legalize sexual activity involving those under the age of consent, when both partners are close-in-age. In some places, civil and criminal laws within the same state conflict with each other.

Summary

State/territory	By age	By authority	Unrestricted
		16	19
		16	18
			16
			18
	14	16	18
			18
	14		17
	13	16	18
	16		18
	16		18
			16
	14		16
			18
		17	18
	14		16
	14	16
			16
	16		18
			17
	14		16
	14	16	18
			16
		16
	13	16
			16
	14		17
			16
			16
			16
	13	16	18
	13	16	18
	13	16	18
			17
	13		16
	15		18
	13	16	18
	13	16	18
	16	18	20
			18
	13	16	18
			16
	14		16
	14		16
			16
	13		18
		17	18
	13		18
	16		18
	15	16	18
	15		18
		16	21
		16	18
			16
		18
			17

History

While the unrestricted age of consent is between 16 and 18 in all U.S. states, the laws have widely varied across the country in the past. In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7. The ages of consent were raised across the U.S. during the late 19th century and the early 20th century. By 1920, 26 states had an age of consent at 16, 21 states had an age of consent at 18, and one state had an age of consent at 14. Small adjustments to these laws occurred after 1920. The last two states to raise their age of general consent from under 16 to 16 or higher were Georgia, which raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 in 1995, and Hawaii, which changed it from 14 to 16 in 2001.
Age-of-consent laws historically only applied when a female was younger than her male partner. By 2015, ages of consent were gender independent. Until the late 20th century many states had provisions requiring that the teenage girl must be of "chaste character" in order for the sexual conduct to be considered criminal. In 1998, Mississippi became the last state to remove the chastity provision from its code.
The laws were designed to prosecute persons much older than their victims rather than teenagers close in age; therefore prosecutors rarely pursued teenagers in relationships with other teenagers even though some laws made close-in-age teenage relationships illegal. After the 1995 Landry and Forrest study concluded that men aged 20 and older produced half of the teenage pregnancies of girls between 15 and 17, states began to more stringently enforce age-of-consent laws to combat teenage pregnancy in addition to preventing adults from taking advantage of minors.
A backlash among the public occurred when some teenagers engaging in close-in-age relationships received punishments perceived by the public to be disproportionate, and thus age-gap provisions were added to reduce or eliminate penalties if the two parties are close in age. Brittany Logino Smith and Glen A. Kercher of the Criminal Justice Center of Sam Houston State University wrote that these laws are often referred to as "Romeo and Juliet laws", though they defined Romeo and Juliet as only referring to an affirmative defense against prosecution. Previously some of these statutes only applied to heterosexual sex, leaving homosexual sex in the same age range open to prosecution.
On June 26, 2003, both heterosexual and homosexual sodomy became legal in all U.S. states, District of Columbia, and territories, under the U.S. Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas. In State v. Limon, the Kansas Supreme Court used Lawrence as a precedent to overturn the state's, which prescribed lesser penalties for heterosexual than homosexual acts of similar age of consent-related offenses.
Since 2005, states have been enacting Jessica's Law statutes, which provide for lengthy penalties for the most aggravated forms of child sexual abuse.

Federal laws

forbids the use of the United States Postal Service or other interstate or foreign means of communication, such as telephone calls or use of the internet, to persuade or entice a minor ''to be involved in a criminal sexual act. The act has to be illegal under state or federal law to be charged with a crime under 2422, and can even be applied to situations where both parties reside within the same state but use an instant messenger program whose servers are located in another state.
forbids transporting a minor in interstate or foreign commerce with the intent of engaging in criminal sexual acts in which a person can be charged. This subsection is ambiguous on its face and seems to apply only when the minor is transported across state or international lines to a place where the conduct is already illegal to begin with. The United States Department of Justice seems to agree with this interpretation.
forbids traveling in interstate or foreign commerce to engage in "illicit sexual conduct" with a minor; this is considered one form of sexual tourism. 2423 refers to Chapter 109A as its bright line for defining "illicit sexual conduct" as far as non-commercial sexual activity is concerned. For the purposes of age of consent, the only provision applicable is . 2243 refers to situations where such younger person is under the age of 16 years, has attained 12 years of age, and the older person is more than 4 years older than the 12-to-15-year-old. So, the age is 12 years if one is within 4 years of the 12-to-15-year-old's age, 16 under all other circumstances. This law is also extraterritorial in nature to U.S. citizens and residents who travel outside of the United States.
Although legislation tends to reflect general societal attitudes regarding male versus female ages of consent, Richard Posner notes in his Guide to America's Sex Laws:
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that stricter rules for males do not violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution, on the theory that men lack the disincentives that women have, to engage in sexual activity, and the law may thus provide men with those disincentives in the form of criminal sanctions.

The Assimilative Crimes Act incorporates local state criminal law when on federal reservations such as Bureau of Land Management property, military posts and shipyards, national parks, national forests, inter alia. Consequently, if an act is not punishable under any federal law then the local state's age-of-consent laws would apply to the crime.
The Protect Act § 503 of 1992 makes it a federal crime to possess or create sexually explicit images of any person under 18 years of age regardless of consent. The non-commercial possession of an explicit picture or video clip of the person under the age of eighteen may still constitute a serious federal child pornography felony. The sentence for a first time offender convicted of producing child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2251, face fines and a statutory minimum of 15 years to 30 years maximum in prison. While mandatory minimum offenses do not apply to mere possession of child pornography, it is almost always the case that a person in possession of child pornography is also necessarily guilty of either receipt of child pornography, which carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, or production of child pornography, which carries a fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence.
However, in Esquivel-Quintana v. Sessions, the Supreme Court held that in the context of statutory rape offenses that criminalize sexual intercourse based solely on the ages of the participants, the generic federal definition'' of "sexual abuse of a minor" requires the age of the victim to be less than 16.