A version of the digital-assets law covered 47 states and the District of Columbia on July 28, 2026. Two states have enacted no version at all.
The law in question is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, RUFADAA for short, finished as a model text in 2015. States each enact a version of their own. A model law does nothing on its own, and it binds nobody until a legislature passes its own text. So what happens to your accounts can change at a state line, and it often does.
That count leaves out Delaware, which runs an older law of its own, and it counts the District of Columbia separately. Both choices are defensible. Change either one and the total moves, so a bare number tells you less about your own state than it seems to.
Louisiana and Massachusetts have enacted neither RUFADAA nor the older generation of act that came before it. Survivors there work under other law entirely.
Where a state has enacted RUFADAA, the wording still varies, and so do the section numbers your lawyer will end up citing. The structure holds across states. An online-tool direction outranks a will, the catalogue of messages separates from their content, and a documented request starts a 60-day clock. Who decides what happens to an account sets out that structure in detail.
So the state question matters less than most families expect, and it matters most at the edges of the map. The edges are where the surprises live. Which state governs your estate, and what that state’s version says, is a question for the lawyer handling it.
Why one source says 47 and another says 48
Two careful sources can print different totals in the same week, and neither one has to be wrong. The difference sits in what gets counted.
Delaware passed a broader law back in 2014, a generation before RUFADAA, and it never swapped that law for the newer text. Counting it as an adopter is a judgment call. A source that counts Delaware in reports 48, and a source that leaves Delaware out reports 47. Neither figure is a mistake, and neither one tells you what Delaware law says about your account.
The District of Columbia raises the same question from the other direction, because it isn’t a state at all. Some tallies fold it in. Others don’t, so either total can be honest, depending on how the writer handled those two entries.
The wider problem is that totals from 38 to 48 were all circulating at the same time in 2026. Most of the low numbers are stale, not wrong.
Adoption climbed steadily from 2015 onward, so a page written in 2018 and never revised still reads as current today. Nothing on it looks out of date. The figure sits in a sentence with no year attached, and a reader has no way to date it. That’s why every claim on this site carries a verification date, and July 28, 2026 is the date behind this one.
So a total on its own tells you almost nothing, and the useful question is much narrower. Ask what your state did, and when. How this site checks its facts sets out what drifts here and what holds still.
Three states sit outside the main pattern
Three states sit outside the pattern, and each one sits outside it for a completely different reason. Delaware is the mildest case.
Delaware enacted a broader predecessor act in 2014, and its code still carries that text instead of the RUFADAA text. The older act reaches further. It sits in Title 12 of the Delaware Code, at sections 5001 through 5007, and a lawyer there will work from it. A chart that marks Delaware as a non-adopter is right about RUFADAA and silent about the law Delaware applies.
Louisiana is the harder case, because a bill introduced there in 2016 died in conference and never became law at all. No version of either act applies. A citation reading 51:2701 through 2720 circulates anyway, formatted on the page exactly like a real statute.
That citation points at the text of the bill that died, dressed up to look like enacted law. Nothing behind it was ever passed.
Massachusetts has enacted neither act either, and two bills numbered H.4639 and S.1110 were pending there in early 2026. What happens next is up to that legislature. Massachusetts does have something else, because its highest court ruled in 2017 on consent under the federal privacy statute. That ruling held that a personal representative can supply the lawful consent the statute asks for.
Three limits travel with that ruling, and each one matters to a family reading about it. The statute permits disclosure rather than requiring it. The court left the provider’s terms unresolved on remand, the ruling binds Massachusetts alone, and roughly 12 years on the family was still waiting.
California spent years listed on the wrong side
California enacted its own version in 2016, in the state’s Probate Code at sections 870 through 884. Plenty of published charts still say otherwise.
The error traces back to a map drawn around 2017, when the picture across the country was genuinely unsettled. The map was wrong even then. Commercial sources copied it, then copied each other, and the mistake was still in print in 2026. Nobody went back to the statute, because the chart looked authoritative and the statute takes longer to read.
California went further in 2025, extending the same access rules to conservators and to agents under a power of attorney. That change took effect January 1, 2025. A chart printed before then describes a narrower law than the one a California court would apply today.
The same failure repeats anywhere a secondary source outlives the law it was written to describe. Adoption status drifts every year.
Retention policies and loyalty-program terms drift on much the same schedule, and settings paths change with no notice at all. The statutory framework holds steady. The three-tier order, the split between catalogue and content, and the security principles behind them haven’t moved. So the parts worth memorizing are the stable parts, and a state count isn’t one of them.
If you’re checking a state today, the enrolled statute on the legislature’s own site beats any chart drawn from it. A law librarian can help you find it. The act’s own text shows what a state started from.
A list you find online can be years out of date
Oklahoma shows how an absence in the record turns into a false conclusion, and how quietly that can happen. Its own act took effect November 1, 2024.
An early pass of the research behind this site classified Oklahoma as a non-adopting state, because no statute turned up. A later pass read the enrolled 2024 act. The earlier conclusion rested on not finding something, and that kind of conclusion decays without anybody noticing. A statute passed last spring leaves a page written last winter looking every bit as confident as before.
The United States Virgin Islands carries a different kind of doubt, because its enactment rests on a single source. This site reports it as uncertain. One unconfirmed source is thinner ground than a citation to an enrolled act, and it deserves to read that way.
So treat any state-by-state chart, even a recent one, as a pointer toward the statute rather than a substitute for it. Charts age faster than statutes.
Two questions settle almost every practical case, and a probate lawyer can answer both in a single meeting. What state governs the estate, and what does its own version of the act say? The court that issued the letters of appointment is the court whose state law you’ll be working under. Everything after that is a platform question.
Companies apply their own rules first, and state law comes into play mainly when a company refuses a documented request. The statute earns its keep there. When a company says no covers the escalation, and an estate lawyer decides whether it’s worth starting.