Statement: Guidance - Deceased Child User Duties

Today, we have published our Statement and final Guidance on the deceased child user duties under the Online Safety Act 2023.

The duties apply to services included on Ofcom’s Register of Categorised Services and are intended to provide greater clarity and support for bereaved parents seeking information about their child’s use of a service.

Under the duties, relevant services must explain their disclosure policies and procedures for requesting information in their terms of service, respond to requests in a timely manner, provide a support function and operate a complaints procedure.  The duties do not require providers to disclose information or prescribe what their disclosure policies must say.

Our final Guidance is intended to help relevant services understand and comply with these requirements. It also includes additional good practice recommendations aimed at ensuring bereaved parents are treated with dignity, respect and sensitivity throughout the process.

Our decisions following consultation

Following consultation, we have broadly confirmed the approach set out in our draft Guidance, which seeks to provide clarity for bereaved parents while allowing providers flexibility in how they meet their duties.

We have made a limited number of changes to our additional good practice recommendations. These concern:

• Information provided through the support function about when responsibility for handling a request may change.
• Information about when the support function is available, including any operating hours.
• Transparency about redaction, including whether information disclosed in response to a request may be redacted and the circumstances in which this may occur.

These recommendations are additional to the steps we recommend providers take to comply with the statutory duties.

Our Statement explains the consultation feedback we received, how we considered it and the reasons for our final decisions.

The deceased child user duties come into force on 11 November 2026.

Consultation documents and responses

We consulted on our draft Guidance between 15 December 2025 and 23 March 2026. The original consultation documents and published responses remain available below.

Other duties on categorised services

The Deceased Child User duties form part of the wider additional duties on categorised services under the Online Safety Act 2023. We are progressing work on the other additional duties separately. Further information about our planned work and timings is available in our online safety roadmap.