State Admissibility Standards

Why this page does not print a fifty-state chart

There is no authoritative national register of state expert-admissibility standards. Every published fifty-state chart is a private compilation, they disagree with one another, and most of the freely available ones are stale. That is not a criticism of the people who compile them. The map moves by legislation, by court rule and by decision, in fifty jurisdictions, on no common schedule.

Three further cautions apply to any such list, including the material below.

• The label is often the wrong unit of analysis. Several states apply one standard to scientific evidence and another to everything else, or one in civil cases and another in criminal.
• Counting rules differ. Whether a state that applies its own articulated reliability standard counts toward the federal column changes the headline number by roughly ten. A figure without its counting rule means nothing.
• A chart cannot show a second screen. Every state that gates novel science on general acceptance also runs a separate reliability or foundation inquiry, and experts are lost on the second one.

What follows is what could be confirmed from rule text, from a state high court, or from a named compilation whose date and provenance are given. Anything relied on in a filing should be checked against the forum’s current rule.

Where general acceptance still gates novel science

Six states can be confirmed from primary or near-primary sources.

• Illinois — Ill. R. Evid. 702 (eff. 1 Jan. 2011). The second sentence codifies the test and applies it only where the opinion rests on “a new or novel scientific methodology or principle.” The committee comment states that the rule “confirms that Illinois is a Frye state.”
• Pennsylvania — Pa.R.E. 702(c) (eff. 18 Mar. 2013): admissibility requires that “the expert’s methodology is generally accepted in the relevant field.” Walsh v. BASF Corp., 234 A.3d 446 (Pa. 2020), then held that a court may not substitute its own reading of the literature for a review of methodology, which is why Pennsylvania is now often described as the most proponent-friendly of these jurisdictions.
• Minnesota — Minn. R. Evid. 702 (amended eff. 1 Sept. 2006) and Goeb v. Tharaldson, 615 N.W.2d 800 (Minn. 2000), which expressly declined to adopt the federal approach.
• New York — common-law and uncodified; People v. Wesley, 83 N.Y.2d 417 (1994), with the foundation gloss of Parker v. Mobil Oil Corp., 7 N.Y.3d 434 (2006). New York has no enacted rules of evidence.
• Washington — Lakey v. Puget Sound Energy, Inc., 176 Wn.2d 909 (2013): the test gates novel methodology, and ER 702 catches the expert who does not adhere to it.
• California — the Kelly test for new scientific techniques, People v. Kelly, 17 Cal. 3d 24 (1976), reaffirmed in People v. Leahy, 8 Cal. 4th 587 (1994), running alongside the Sargon gatekeeping duty under Evidence Code sections 801(b) and 802.

The states that changed sides, and when

Florida has applied the federal standard since 23 May 2019, and the sequence is worth setting out because it is routinely garbled. The legislature amended Fla. Stat. sections 90.702 and 90.704 in 2013 to adopt the federal text and to prohibit “pure opinion” testimony. The Supreme Court of Florida declined to adopt those amendments to the extent they were procedural, 210 So. 3d 1231 (Fla. 2017), and then held in DeLisle v. Crane Co., 258 So. 3d 1219 (Fla. 2018), that general acceptance remained the governing standard. Seven months later a reconstituted court reversed course and adopted the amendments as rules of procedure, 278 So. 3d 551 (Fla. 23 May 2019).

Maryland moved on 28 August 2020 in Rochkind v. Stevenson, 471 Md. 1, abandoning the Frye-Reed standard under Md. Rule 5-702. The District of Columbia moved on 20 October 2016 in Motorola, Inc. v. Murray, 147 A.3d 751, decided en banc and without dissent — the jurisdiction whose own court decided the 1923 case took ninety-three years to leave it. New Jersey aligned its civil standard with the federal factors in In re Accutane Litigation, 234 N.J. 340 (2018) and extended a comparable standard to criminal and quasi-criminal cases in State v. Olenowski, 289 A.3d 456 (N.J. 2023), while cautioning against importing the full body of federal case law. Georgia has applied the reliability standard in civil cases since 2005 and in criminal cases since 1 July 2022; O.C.G.A. section 24-7-702(f) directs that Georgia courts “may draw from” the federal trilogy and its progeny.

The column the binary hides

A substantial group of states applies neither general acceptance nor the federal standard, but a test of its own. Utah is the cleanest example and is miscategorized in both directions. Utah R. Evid. 702 (eff. 1 Nov. 2007) requires only “a threshold showing” that the underlying principles or methods are reliable, are based on sufficient facts or data, and have been reliably applied — and then makes general acceptance sufficient but not necessary to make that showing. The advisory committee note says the threshold requires “only a basic foundational showing of indicia of reliability … not that the opinion is indisputably correct.” Rule text: Utah R. Evid. 702.

The most current multi-state compilation located is the State-by-State Compendium: Standards of Evidence dated 11 July 2023, compiled by Julia Gokhberg and Kate Walford and hosted at ncji.org. It is a student-compiled compendium with case citations for each entry rather than an official source, and it is three years old. It reports the following as applying their own articulated standards: Colorado (People v. Shreck), Hawai‘i (State v. Montalbo), Indiana, Iowa, Montana (Hulse), Nevada (Higgs v. State, 222 P.3d 648 (Nev. 2010), under which the federal factors may be considered but not mechanically applied), New Mexico (Alberico), Oregon (Brown; O’Key), South Carolina (State v. Council), Tennessee (McDaniel v. CSX Transportation, where express adoption was declined and the statutory threshold is “substantially assist”), Utah and Virginia. Each entry should be checked against the state’s current rule before it is relied on. Source: the NCJI compendium, 11 July 2023.

Where the compilations contradict each other

These conflicts are reported rather than resolved, because no primary source was consulted for them and resolving them silently would be worse than naming them.

• North Dakota — listed as a general-acceptance state by one compendium on the basis that the state’s high court has never expressly adopted the federal standard; described elsewhere as applying a state-specific test. Current position unconfirmed.
• Maine — listed in the federal column by one compilation; described by another as rejecting both the federal standard and a general-acceptance requirement in favor of a reliability showing on its own terms. Unconfirmed.
• Montana — listed variously as state-specific, as a federal-standard state, and as applying the federal standard only to novel scientific evidence. Unconfirmed.
• Alaska — listed in the federal column, but at least one compilation reports that experience-based testimony is treated as outside those requirements, which would mean the state did not follow Kumho Tire. That is a material difference for any non-scientific expert, and it is unconfirmed.
• Alabama and Missouri — both apply the reliability standard in most cases subject to statutory carve-outs reported to cover certain family, juvenile and probate proceedings. The exact scope of both carve-outs is unconfirmed.

A related trap: do not assume that a state which adopted the federal standard before 1999 has also addressed whether gatekeeping reaches technical and other specialized knowledge. Several have not.

Three charts in wide circulation that are out of date

Named here so that they are not cited, and because each is still returned near the top of a search for a state comparison.

• Expert Institute, “Daubert vs. Frye: A State-by-State Comparison,” page dated 10 July 2024, still lists Florida in the general-acceptance column five years after the Supreme Court of Florida adopted the federal standard, and lists Utah the same way. Expert Institute is an expert-witness referral company; the interest is worth noting alongside the currency problem.
• Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, S.C., “Admissibility of Expert Testimony in All 50 States,” last updated 18 March 2022, lists Maryland, New Jersey and the District of Columbia as general-acceptance jurisdictions. All three had already moved — in 2020, 2018 and 2016 respectively.
• White and Williams LLP, “States Following the Daubert/Kumho Doctrine,” revised 8 January 2024, still describes New Jersey as applying general acceptance in criminal cases, which Olenowski ended in 2023.

The lesson generalizes, and it applies to this page as well: a chart is a research starting point, not a citation. Before any admissibility question is briefed, the forum’s current rule text and its own high court’s decisions are the authority, and they are what a court will expect to see.

Whether a state has taken the 2023 federal amendment

The amendment to FRE 702 effective 1 December 2023 added the express requirement that “the proponent demonstrates to the court that it is more likely than not” that each condition is met, and rewrote subdivision (d) to require that the opinion “reflects a reliable application” of the principles and methods.

It can only propagate to states that adopted the federal rule text in the first place. A state whose standard is common-law general acceptance, whose rule contains its own acceptance clause, or whose framework is statutory and home-grown has nothing to conform. The question is only meaningful in roughly two-thirds of the country.

Two adoptions are confirmed from state sources. Michigan amended MRE 702 by Supreme Court order of 27 March 2024, effective 1 May 2024, adopting both changes and making the state rule identical to the federal one. Ohio amended Evid.R. 702 effective 1 July 2024; the rule now opens with the “more likely than not” formulation while retaining Ohio’s own subdivision on procedures, tests and experiments. A running tracker of other adoptions is maintained by Lawyers for Civil Justice, an organization of corporate defense counsel that advocates for these adoptions — useful for dates, not for characterization. Florida is the case to watch: its standard sits in a statute whose text still tracks the pre-2023 federal rule, and conforming it requires the legislature and then the court.

Frequently Asked Questions

Published 2026-08-12