Castle Doctrine States (2026): All 50 States, With the Statute

Last verified 5 September 2026 · 50 states · 40 entries confirmed on official state sources, 10 on Cornell LII or Justia mirrors (flagged in the table)

Every state protects you inside your own home — not one of the 50 imposes a duty to retreat from your own dwelling before defending yourself. What changes state to state is how much protection you get. Twenty-six states write a rebuttable presumption of reasonable fear into the statute. Eleven authorize defensive force in the home with no presumption. Eight protect the dwelling only as a carve-out from a general duty to retreat. Five have no castle statute at all.

What is the castle doctrine?

The castle doctrine is the rule that you do not have to retreat from your own home before using force to defend yourself in it. It comes from the English common-law idea that a man’s house is his castle, and in most states it now lives in a statute rather than in a judge’s opinion. In its strongest statutory form it does three things at once: it removes any duty to retreat, it presumes that your fear of death or great bodily harm was reasonable when someone breaks in, and it immunizes you from the civil suit that follows.

Most published lists stop at the first of those three. That is why they disagree with each other about how many “castle doctrine states” there are. The table below separates the three, state by state, with the citation so you can check us.

How we classified all 50 states

Castle doctrine by state: all 50, with the statute

Click any column heading to sort. Bolded states link to a full breakdown. The Source column goes to the state’s own statute page where one was reachable; “Mirror” means the state blocked automated access and we verified the text on Cornell LII or Justia instead.

Download the full 50-state dataset (CSV)

Free to reuse with attribution to Freedom’s Lodge (CC BY 4.0). The CSV carries every field in the table plus each state’s statutory scope, exceptions and source URL.

Which states give you civil immunity?

A criminal acquittal does not end your legal problem. In most states the person you shot — or their estate — can still sue you, and defending that suit is its own financial event. 32 states close that door by statute, several of them adding mandatory attorney’s fees, costs and lost income when you win. Two more (Rhode Island and Utah) do not grant outright immunity but extend their self-defense presumption into civil court, which is close to the same thing in practice.

No statutory civil immunity (15 states): California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington. In these states a justified defensive shooting inside your own home can still put you in front of a civil jury.

Immunity that lives outside the self-defense chapter (6 states): in Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania the civil-immunity provision is not in the criminal self-defense sections at all — it sits in the civil or tort code, which is why it is easy to miss. Arkansas: Ark. Code Ann. § 16-120-302, immunity for deadly force against an initial aggressor, with mandatory attorney’s fees, costs and trial expenses. Idaho: Idaho Code § 6-808, immunity for force justified under § 18-4009 or §§ 19-201 to 19-205, with mandatory fees and costs, subject to a law-enforcement-officer carve-out. Montana: Mont. Code Ann. § 27-1-722, immunity from civil damages for any use of force allowable under Title 45, ch. 3, pt. 1, with fees and costs to the prevailing party. New Hampshire: RSA 627:1-a, immunity for personal injuries sustained by a perpetrator, with fees, expert fees, costs and lost income. Pennsylvania: 42 Pa. C.S. § 8340.2, the same structure as New Hampshire. Ohio is the outlier: it has no general self-defense civil immunity — Ohio Rev. Code § 2305.40 covers only a trespasser unlawfully entering an occupied dwelling, and § 2307.601 is a no-duty-to-retreat rule for tort actions rather than immunity from suit.

The five states with no castle statute

Maryland, New Mexico, Vermont, Virginia and Washington have never enacted a castle doctrine statute. That does not mean you must retreat inside your own home in those states — the courts in each have said you do not. It means the rule is judge-made, and a judge-made rule can be narrowed by the next case, argued over in jury instructions, and does not come with a presumption or with immunity. Virginia is the clearest example: the no-retreat rule traces to Fortune v. Commonwealth (1922) and was restated in Hines v. Commonwealth (2016), and codification bills have failed repeatedly.

What changed recently

Self-defense law is not static. These states amended a relevant statute in 2021 or later:

• New Mexico (2025 (jury instructions)) — Criminal UJI self-defense series amended effective Dec. 31, 2025
• Oklahoma (2025) — Amended May 14, 2025 (Laws 2025, c. 261)
• Georgia (2024 (immunity statutes)) — 2024 amendments (Ga. L. 2024, p. 545) — construing case law thin
• Indiana (2024) — Ind. Code § 35-41-3-2(d)
• New York (2024 (§ 35.15 revision date)) — § 35.15 shows a 2024 revision — confirm the substantive change
• Utah (2024) — § 76-2-405 amended effective May 1, 2024
• West Virginia (2024) — Amended by H.B. 5621 (2024) — confirm the substance of that change
• Mississippi (2023) — Amended 2023 (SB 2079) — verify subsection numbering
• Connecticut (2022) — Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53a-19(b)
• Vermont (2022) — No statute — State v. Hatcher, 167 Vt. 338 (1997); 13 V.S.A. § 2305 is a justifiable-homicide statute
• Arkansas (2021 (§ 5-2-607)) — 2021 stand-your-ground amendment; case law still developing
• Delaware (2021) — 11 Del. C. § 464(e)
• Ohio (2021) — Ohio Rev. Code §§ 2901.05(B), 2901.09
• South Dakota (2021) — Scheme fully rewritten in 2021; case law still developing
• Tennessee (2021) — Public Chapter 1100 (eff. July 1, 2026) rewrote the companion defense-of-property statute § 39-11-614

Castle doctrine vs stand your ground: not the same thing

Castle doctrine is about place. Stand your ground is about everywhere else. A castle statute says you need not retreat inside your dwelling; a stand-your-ground statute says you need not retreat anywhere you have a lawful right to be. Many states have both, which is why the two get blended together in most published lists — including the ones currently ranking for this search.

The distinction is not academic. Pennsylvania, for example, has a full castle presumption in the home but limits its stand-your-ground rule outside the home to situations where the assailant displays a weapon readily capable of lethal use. Ohio bars the jury from even considering whether you could have retreated. Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York and Oregon keep a general retreat duty and carve out the dwelling alone.

Deep dives by state

Full breakdowns — statute scope, exceptions, civil exposure and what the state does outside the home:

• California castle doctrine — Cal. Penal Code § 198.5, presumption of reasonable fear
• Texas castle doctrine — Tex. Penal Code §§ 9.31, 9.32, presumption of reasonable fear
• Ohio castle doctrine — Ohio Rev. Code §§ 2901.05, presumption of reasonable fear
• Florida castle doctrine — Fla. Stat. § 776.013, presumption of reasonable fear
• Pennsylvania castle doctrine — 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 505, presumption of reasonable fear
• Illinois castle doctrine — 720 ILCS 5/7-2, no statutory presumption
• Michigan castle doctrine — Mich. Comp. Laws §§ 780.951, 780.972, presumption of reasonable fear
• Missouri castle doctrine — Mo. Rev. Stat. § 563.031, no statutory presumption
• North Carolina castle doctrine — N.C. Gen. Stat. §§ 14-51.2, 14-51.3, presumption of reasonable fear
• Virginia castle doctrine — No statute — Hines v. Commonwealth, 292 Va. 674, no statutory presumption

Also on Freedom’s Lodge: the 2A legal glossary and how we verify carry-law data.

How this guide was made: every entry was built by pulling the state’s own statute or controlling case from the legislature, revisor, or court website and recording what it actually says — no summaries of summaries. Where a state’s official site blocked automated access, we used the Cornell LII or Justia mirror and labeled that row so you know the difference. Research assembled August 18, 2026 and human-edited before publication.