Do I Have to be Married to Adopt a Child in Alabama

People ask us this question all the time, usually with a little worry in their voice: “Do I have to be married to adopt a child in Alabama?” The short answer is no. A single adult can adopt in this state, and thousands have. Marriage is not a legal gate you have to pass through before a court will let you become a parent. What the law actually cares about is whether you are an adult, whether you can provide a safe and stable home, and whether the adoption serves the best interest of the child. Being married opens the door to a joint adoption by a couple, but it is not something a single person needs in order to adopt. The one thing Alabama does not allow is two unmarried people adopting the same child together.

That answer matters more now than it used to, because Alabama rewrote its entire adoption law. The old Alabama Adoption Code, which lived at Title 26, Chapter 10A of the Code of Alabama for decades, was repealed by Act 2023-92. In its place, effective January 1, 2024, the Legislature enacted two separate laws: the Alabama Minor Adoption Code at Title 26, Chapter 10E, which governs the adoption of children, and the Alabama Adult Adoption Code at Chapter 10F, which governs the adoption of adults. If you read an older article, an old form, or even some law firm web pages, you may still see references to the repealed Chapter 10A sections. The framework in this article follows the current statutes. When you sit down with a lawyer, make sure you are working from the new code and the new probate court forms, not the ones that were retired.

The Short Answer, and Why It Confuses So Many People

Section 26-10E-5 of the Alabama Minor Adoption Code is the provision that answers the marriage question directly. Subsection (a) says an unmarried individual or a married couple may petition to adopt a minor, and subsection (b) says an unmarried couple may not adopt a minor. Read those two lines together and you see the dividing line the statute actually draws, and it is not the one most people expect. The line is between an individual and a couple, not between a single person and a married person. A single individual can adopt on their own. A married couple can adopt jointly. But two people who are not married to each other cannot adopt the same child together. Subsection (g) goes a step further and says no state department rule may block an adoption solely because the petitioner is unmarried. So a single mother who wants to adopt her niece, a divorced man who wants to adopt the child he has raised, and a never-married woman who is adopting through an agency all qualify, because each of them is adopting as an individual.

Where the confusion comes from is the difference between what the law requires and what an agency or a caseworker prefers. Alabama law does not require marriage. A private adoption agency, on the other hand, is allowed to set its own placement standards, and some agencies do prefer married couples for certain placements, especially infant placements where birth parents are choosing the family. That is a private policy, not a legal rule. If one agency turns you away because you are single, another may not, and Department of Human Resources foster-to-adopt placements routinely go to single adults. Do not let an agency’s internal preference convince you that Alabama law bars single-parent adoption. It does not.

This catches unmarried partners off guard, so it is worth being concrete about it. Alabama does not recognize a second-parent adoption, the kind some states allow, where an unmarried partner adds themselves as a legal parent alongside the child’s existing parent. The statute also caps the petitioners at two people and bars a group larger than that. So if you and a partner are not married and you both want to be legal parents of the same child, the honest answer is that Alabama law does not give you a joint path. One of you could adopt as a single individual, and marrying would open the joint route, but the two of you cannot share legal parentage through adoption while you are unmarried. If that is your situation, talk it through with an adoption lawyer before you file, because the options are narrower than most people assume.

Who Alabama Law Actually Allows to Adopt

Marriage is not the only eligibility question, so it helps to walk through everything Section 26-10E-5 asks of an adopting parent. Get these straight early, because they shape whether you can file at all.

You Must Be an Adult

You have to be an adult to adopt. In Alabama, the age of majority is 19, not 18, under Ala. Code Section 26-1-1. That is a quirk that trips up people who move here from other states. An 18-year-old is still legally a minor in Alabama for most purposes, which means an 18-year-old cannot adopt here. Once you turn 19, you clear the adult threshold.

The Ten-Year Age Gap

The current code generally expects the adopting parent to be at least ten years older than the child being adopted. This is a meaningful change in emphasis from how many people remember the old law, and it is worth confirming with your attorney for your exact situation. There are built-in exceptions. Stepparents and relatives are commonly excepted from a strict age-gap requirement, and the court has discretion to approve an adoption that serves the child’s best interest even when the ten-year gap is not met. The point of the rule is to keep adoptions oriented around a parent-child relationship rather than something closer to a sibling relationship, but the statute leaves room for the real families that do not fit a rigid formula.

You Generally Have to Live in Alabama

Section 26-10E-5 requires a petitioner to be a bona fide resident of Alabama at the time the petition is filed, unless the adoption is coming into the state under the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children. Residency does not mean you must have lived here for years. It means Alabama is genuinely your home. If a child is being placed with you from another state, the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, known as the ICPC, has to be satisfied before the child crosses state lines, and both states’ compact administrators have to sign off. Skipping the ICPC is one of the most common and most serious mistakes in interstate adoption, and it can unwind a placement, so it is not a step to improvise.

Married Couples File Together, With One Big Exception

When a married couple adopts, the general rule is that both spouses petition jointly. Alabama does not let one married spouse quietly adopt a child on their own while the other spouse stays off the paperwork, because adoption creates a legal parent-child relationship for the whole household. The major exception is the stepparent adoption. When the person adopting is the stepparent of the child, the petition is filed in the name of the stepparent alone, since the child’s other legal parent is already the petitioner’s spouse. If you are a stepparent hoping to formalize your relationship with your spouse’s child, our attorneys handle stepparent adoption in Alabama regularly, and it is often the most straightforward path to legal parentage that a family can take.

Two Myths We Have to Clear Up: The “Married Three Years” Rule and the Citizenship Rule

Because we are correcting an older version of this very article, we want to be blunt about two things you may have read that are not accurate statements of Alabama adoption law.

The first myth is that a married couple must have been married for at least three years before they can adopt. There is no such requirement in the Alabama Minor Adoption Code. Section 26-10E-5 does not set a minimum length of marriage. A couple married for six months can petition to adopt in Alabama. Now, does a longer, stable marriage help your home study look strong? Sure, stability of every kind helps. But there is no magic three-year mark written into the statute, and no probate judge is going to reject an otherwise fit couple for being newlyweds.

The second myth is that at least one spouse has to be a United States citizen to adopt. That is not an Alabama adoption requirement either. The confusion is understandable, because citizenship absolutely matters in intercountry adoption, where a child is being adopted from another country and brought to the United States. In that setting, federal immigration law and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rules govern who may petition for the child’s immigration, and citizenship and marriage-length questions do come into play there. But those are federal immigration rules for bringing a foreign-born child home, not Alabama’s rules for who may adopt. For a domestic Alabama adoption, your citizenship is not the deciding factor. If your situation involves an intercountry adoption, that is exactly the kind of case where you want a lawyer coordinating the Alabama probate side and the federal immigration side so the two do not work against each other.

The Kinds of Adoption Alabama Families Actually Pursue

Adoption is not one thing. The marriage question, the consent question, and the timeline all shift depending on the type of adoption you are doing. Here are the paths we see most often in Alabama.

Stepparent Adoption

This is the most common adoption we handle, and it is frequently the simplest. A stepparent who has helped raise a spouse’s child petitions to become that child’s legal parent. The child keeps living exactly where they already live. The main legal hurdle is the other biological parent, whose parental rights usually must be addressed, either through consent or through a legal basis to proceed without it. When it works, it gives the child the security of two committed legal parents and it makes everything from school forms to inheritance clean and simple.

Relative and Grandparent Adoption

Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives step in more often than people realize, sometimes because a parent has died, sometimes because a parent cannot safely care for the child. Alabama treats relative adoptions favorably and often relaxes some of the formalities, such as the strict age-gap expectation, because keeping a child inside their own family is usually in the child’s best interest. If you are a grandparent raising a grandchild and you want legal permanence rather than a temporary custody order, grandparent adoption in Alabama may give you the security that a custody order alone cannot.

Agency Adoption

In an agency adoption, a licensed child-placing agency handles the placement. The agency takes relinquishments from birth parents, screens prospective adoptive families, and matches children with homes. Agencies carry their own home study and placement standards on top of what the law requires, which is where those private preferences about marital status can appear. Working through an agency adoption can add structure and support, but you still finalize the adoption in probate court, and you still want your own lawyer looking out for you rather than relying solely on the agency’s counsel.

Private or Independent Adoption

A private adoption happens directly between a birth parent and an adoptive family, often with a lawyer coordinating the consents, the investigation, and the court filing rather than an agency. Alabama regulates how a child may lawfully be placed for adoption, and there are criminal penalties for unlawful placement of a child, so private adoptions have to be done by the book. This is not a handshake arrangement you can paper over later. Get the consents, the notices, and the investigation right from the start.

Department of Human Resources Foster-to-Adopt

When a child is in the state’s custody and the parents’ rights have been terminated or surrendered, that child may become available for adoption through the Alabama Department of Human Resources. This is the path where single adults adopt most freely, because DHR’s mission is to find permanent homes for children who need them. The foster-to-adopt route usually begins with an application to DHR, a series of required training hours covering trauma, attachment, safety, and behavior, and a home study in which a caseworker visits your home and interviews the household. After approval, there are pre-placement visits, then placement, then a period of the child living in the home before the adoption can be finalized in court. Because DHR cases can overlap with dependency and custody proceedings, families sometimes end up dealing with both a juvenile court matter and a probate adoption. Our team is familiar with how DHR custody cases intersect with the adoption process.

Adult Adoption

Yes, you can adopt an adult in Alabama, and it is governed by the separate Alabama Adult Adoption Code at Chapter 10F. People do this to formalize a lifelong parent-child bond that was never made legal, to secure inheritance rights, or to create a legal family relationship for a dependent adult. The centerpiece of an adult adoption is the consent of the adult being adopted, since a competent adult decides for themselves. If this is your situation, our attorneys handle adult adoption in Alabama and can explain how the adult code differs from the minor code.

What the Court and the Home Study Really Look For

Since marriage is not the test, it is fair to ask what the actual test is. Alabama requires an investigation, commonly called a home study, in most non-stepparent adoptions. A qualified investigator looks at your home, your background, your finances, your health, and your fitness to parent, and files a report with the court. Do not let the word “investigation” scare you. It is not designed to find a perfect family, because perfect families do not exist. It is designed to confirm that a child placed with you will be safe, supported, and loved.

In practice, the home study looks at whether you have a stable place to live with appropriate room for a child, whether your income can realistically support another person, whether your criminal and child-abuse background checks come back clean, whether you are healthy enough to parent for the long haul, and whether the adults in the home understand what parenting an adopted child, sometimes a child who has been through trauma, actually asks of them. A single applicant meets these standards the same way a married couple does. What matters is the substance of the home, not the number of adults signing the lease.

This is also the stage where honesty pays off. If there is something in your history, a past arrest, a health issue, a prior involvement with a child welfare agency, tell your lawyer up front. Most of these things do not automatically disqualify you, but hiding them and having them surface later can. A good adoption lawyer would rather deal with a hard fact early than get ambushed by it at a hearing.

Consent: The Part That Trips People Up

If there is one issue that turns a smooth adoption into a contested fight, it is consent. Under the Alabama Minor Adoption Code, Section 26-10E-7 spells out whose consent is required, which typically includes the child’s legal parents and, in some situations, the child if the child is old enough. The code also addresses consent by a minor parent, implied consent, and the specific situations in which a person’s consent is not required at all. When a parent will not consent and there is no legal ground to move forward without it, the adoption becomes contested, and the court has to resolve the parental rights before an adoption can be finalized.

Fathers deserve a special mention here, because Alabama maintains a Putative Father Registry under Ala. Code Section 26-10C-1. A putative father is a man who may be the biological father of a child born to a woman he is not married to. If he wants notice of an adoption and a chance to assert his parental rights, the registry is how he preserves that right, and there are tight deadlines. A father who fails to register or otherwise assert his rights on time can lose the ability to block the adoption. On the flip side, if you are an adoptive parent, making sure the father’s rights have been properly addressed is essential, because an adoption that skips a father with real rights is an adoption that can be challenged later. When paternity itself is unsettled, establishing it correctly comes first, and our Alabama paternity attorneys deal with these questions regularly.

Consent, once properly given, is powerful, and the code sets out the formalities for how it must be taken and when it can be withdrawn. This is not a place to rely on a form you found online. The consent documents, the notices to interested parties, and the timing all have to line up. Get one piece wrong and you can hand the other side a reason to attack the adoption down the road.

Where Adoptions Are Filed and How the Case Moves

Alabama adoptions of minors are filed in probate court, and the probate court has jurisdiction over these proceedings under Section 26-10E-3 of the Minor Adoption Code. Venue, meaning which county’s probate court is the right one, is set by Section 26-10E-4, and it generally follows where the adoptee or the petitioner lives or where a placing agency is located. The probate court is where a family’s adoption becomes final, and for most families it is a warm day rather than a tense one.

The typical sequence looks like this. You file a petition to adopt. The court arranges for notice to everyone entitled to it and, where required, for the investigation and report. If everyone who must consent has consented and the paperwork is clean, the court can move the case toward finalization. Some cases move through an interlocutory order first, essentially a conditional decree, before the final decree issues. If someone contests the adoption, the case can move into a contested hearing, and in some situations the probate court can transfer a disputed matter to the juvenile or circuit court under Section 26-10E-3 to resolve the parental rights piece. Once the final decree of adoption is entered, the legal relationship is complete. The adopted child becomes the legal child of the adoptive parent for all purposes, including inheritance, and the state can issue a new birth certificate reflecting the adoptive parents.

That inheritance point is not a footnote. After a final adoption, the adopted child inherits from and through the adoptive parents just as a biological child would, and the legal ties to the prior parent are generally severed. Families who care about estate planning should update their wills and beneficiary designations after an adoption is final so that the documents match the new legal reality.

How Long Does an Alabama Adoption Take, and What Does It Cost?

There is no single answer, because the type of adoption drives everything. A clean stepparent adoption where the other parent consents can wrap up in a few months. A DHR foster-to-adopt case runs on the state’s timeline and typically requires the child to live in the home for a set period before finalization. A contested adoption, where a parent fights the termination of their rights, can take much longer and is genuinely unpredictable.

Cost varies just as much. A straightforward stepparent or relative adoption costs far less than an agency or intercountry adoption that carries agency fees, home study fees, and, in some cases, birth-parent expenses allowed by law. Court costs and the investigation add to the total. Because adoption is a family-law matter with a lot of moving parts, we do not quote a flat price sight unseen the way we can for something like an uncontested divorce. What we do is sit down with you, learn which type of adoption you are pursuing, and give you a realistic picture of the work and the cost before you commit. We invite you to schedule a consultation so we can do exactly that for your family.

Common Situations We See

A few patterns come up again and again, and they show how much the marriage question fades once you get into the details.

A single professional in her thirties wants to adopt through DHR. She worries her marital status will disqualify her. It will not. She completes the training, passes the home study, and adopts a child who needed a permanent home. Her being single was never the obstacle she feared.

A husband wants to adopt the children he has raised since they were toddlers, his wife’s kids from a prior relationship. The biological father has been absent for years. This is a stepparent adoption, and the central question is how to address the absent father’s rights, through consent if he will give it or through a legal basis to proceed without it. Marriage here is a help, not a hurdle, because it is what makes the stepparent path available in the first place.

A grandmother has been raising her grandson under an informal arrangement and now wants legal permanence. She is widowed, so she is single, and she can adopt. A relative adoption gives her son the stability that a loose custody understanding never could, and it protects him if something happens to her.

In each of these, the family’s real questions were about consent, about the father’s rights, about the timeline, and about doing the paperwork correctly. Whether the petitioner was married barely mattered. That is usually how it goes.

Talk to an Alabama Adoption Lawyer

So, do you have to be married to adopt a child in Alabama? No. Single adults adopt in this state every year. What you actually need is to be an adult, generally at least ten years older than the child, an Alabama resident, and able to give a child a safe and stable home, and you need to handle consent and the court process correctly under the current Alabama Minor Adoption Code. Marriage is not the test. Fitness and doing it right are.

Adoption law in Alabama changed in a big way on January 1, 2024, and the details matter more than most families realize. If you are thinking about adopting, whether it is a stepchild, a grandchild, a foster child, or an adult, the smartest first move is to talk with a lawyer who works in the new code every day. The Harris Firm LLC helps families across Alabama with adoptions, and our Alabama adoption lawyers can walk you through your specific path. We also handle the related matters that so often sit next to an adoption, from custody to paternity, and you can learn more about our broader practice from our Alabama family law attorneys page.

Call The Harris Firm LLC at (205) 201-1789 to schedule a consultation. We serve clients from our offices in Birmingham, Chelsea, Huntsville, and Montgomery, and we would be glad to help you understand your options and take the next step toward growing your family.

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