Is a VPN legal in Iran?
Licensed providers only
Only state-approved VPNs are lawful. Unapproved services are widely used anyway and are the target of continuous blocking.
This is not legal advice. It is a summary of publicly reported positions, last reviewed on 2026-09-13. Laws in this area change quickly and are often enforced differently from how they are written.
If the answer matters to your safety, check a current local source before you travel or install anything. Every claim here links to what it rests on.
What we measure there
The summary above is second-hand. This part is ours: network measurements taken in Iran by volunteer probes, which say what is actually reachable rather than what the law says.
- 29.36% — confirmed blocking
- 12.11% — unproven anomalies
- 670,310 — measurements
- Aug. 14, 2026 → Sept. 13, 2026
Confirmed means a block page was served or a DNS answer pointed somewhere it demonstrably should not. Anomalies looked wrong but could not be proven, and ordinary network trouble produces those too — which is why the two are not added together here or anywhere else on this site.
Sources
- Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2025
- Blocking measurements: OONI, CC BY-SA 4.0
Legal summary last reviewed 2026-09-13.
Similar
Licensed providers only