North Carolina Laws Beginning in 2025
With the start of 2025, North Carolina has a lot of new laws that will take effect. We gathered a list of the new laws that will begin in the state in 2025. There are laws about human trafficking and the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Other laws cover immigration, building codes, and school vouchers to name a few.
North Carolina Senate Bill
166
Building Codes. This bill includes various changes to current requirements on building codes.
North Carolina House Bills
10
This bill requires sheriff’s offices across the state to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They must hold a suspect thought to be in the country unlawfully for up to 48 hours to give ICE time to take custody of the person. House Bill 10 also includes another law taking effect this month impacting school vouchers, which will allocate about $463 million to the Opportunity Scholarship program for grants for parents who want their children to attend private or religious K-12 schools.
198
Changes to several NCDOT laws including a requirement that toll bills have vehicle identification numbers or other vehicle identifying information on the document. Processing fees for unpaid tolls increase under the new bill. The law also allows billboard companies to cut down more trees along state highways.
199
Various parts of this law target the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV). One includes a requirement that the DMV makes a plan to issue a digital version of a driver’s license by the time this part of the bill goes into effect on July 1, 2025.
237
This is the law that now restricts when a person can wear a face mask in public. The bill aims to make it easier to prosecute people trying to hide behind a mask while committing a crime. This would repeal the pandemic-era exemption that allowed mask-wearing for health reasons. The bill also includes laws that prohibit individuals from standing, sitting, or lying on highways or streets in a manner that impedes traffic.
591
This bill seeks to establish sexual extortion offenses, update offenses related to sexual exploitation of a minor, update sex offender and public protection registration programs and clarify the offense of disclosure of private images.
600
This bill is related to hog farm regulations. The law makes changes to watershed provisions and could limit how the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) reviews hog farm permits.
834
The Juvenile Justice Modifications allow 16 and 17-year-olds who commit certain felony crimes to be tried as adults.
900
This bill allows Wake County to replace Saint Augustine’s University as the higher education partner for its two leadership academies, the Wake Young Men’s Leadership Academy and Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy. It also includes measures to curb youth access to products containing tobacco, nicotine, and other related substances.
971
The new law directs the Department of Labor to develop human trafficking awareness training for lodging establishments, accommodation facilitators, and property managers for vacation rentals to implement human trafficking awareness training. The bill also makes changes to penalties for trafficking-related arrests.
