What Changed for California Surrogacy on July 1, 2026

Last reviewed October 2026. General education, not legal advice. Your own attorney, licensed in California and paid for by the intended parents, is the person who applies this to your journey.

On July 1, 2026, California adopted a new Rule of Court specifically for parentage cases that come out of assisted reproduction agreements. If you are a surrogate or an intended parent in California, almost nothing about your rights changed. What changed is the paperwork, who files it, and how carefully it has to be assembled.

That distinction matters, because paperwork is where surrogacy journeys actually go wrong.

The short version

Before July 2026, a California surrogacy parentage case was filed using the general family-law forms — the ones also used for divorce, custody and child support. Attorneys adapted them. Courts accepted them. It worked, but it meant every county had its own habits about what it wanted to see.

Now there is a dedicated path: California Rule of Court 5.78, and a new set of forms built for exactly this situation.

What is actually different

1. There are purpose-built petition forms now

Gestational carrier cases are started on one of two new mandatory forms:

• SUR-100 — Petition to Determine Parental Relationship
• SUR-100(J) — Joint Petition to Determine Parental Relationship, when the surrogate and the intended parents file together

The old approach of adapting the general FL-200 petition is no longer how these cases get filed. If your attorney mentions "the SUR forms", this is what they mean.

2. The rule spells out what has to be lodged with the court

This is the part worth reading twice. Under Rule 5.78, filing a gestational carrier case requires:

• A true and correct copy of the notarized agreement, lodged with the clerk
• Declarations from the separate, independent attorneys who represented each side
• A declaration from the fertility physician, showing compliance with Family Code section 7962(d)
• The parties' own declarations under section 7962(e)

None of these requirements are new in substance — Family Code section 7962 already required a notarized agreement and independent counsel on both sides. What is new is that the rule now says, in one place, exactly what the court expects to see in the file.

Read that list again from a surrogate's point of view. Every single item is a protection for you. Your own lawyer has to put her name on a declaration. The clinic has to confirm the agreement was in place before the medical process began. The court checks the order of events rather than taking anyone's word for it.

3. One old rule was folded in, and one form became conditional

Rule 5.51, which covered the confidential cover sheet for assisted reproduction cases, was repealed and absorbed into Rule 5.78. And the UCCJEA declaration (form FL-105/GC-120) is no longer required in every assisted reproduction parentage case — under Rule 5.52 it is now only mandatory where custody or parenting time is genuinely at issue, which in a gestational carrier case it normally is not.

That is a small, sensible cleanup: one less form asking questions that do not apply to a surrogacy journey.

4. Confidentiality is stated plainly

With the exception of the final judgment, the papers in these cases — including the SUR-100 and SUR-100(J) — are confidential under the Uniform Parentage Act and are not open to public inspection.

For a surrogate, that means your name, your medical history and your compensation do not end up on a searchable public docket. Judgments are issued on form FL-250, and the judgment does not need to state that the case involved a gestational carrier agreement at all.

What did not change

Everything that makes California the state most surrogacy law gets measured against is untouched:

• Your gestational carrier agreement must still be fully executed and notarized before an embryo transfer or any injectable medication in preparation for one. Contract first, medication second. Always.
• You and the intended parents must still each have separate, independent, licensed counsel of your own choosing, and yours is still paid for by the intended parents.
• Parentage is still established by a pre-birth judgment, not an adoption. You never relinquish a child you were never the legal parent of.
• A properly executed, notarized agreement still rebuts contrary presumptions about who the parents are.

If your journey is already underway

You do not need to do anything. This is a procedural rule about how cases are filed, and it is your attorney's job to file them correctly.

But there are two reasonable questions to ask on your next call:

1. "Are we filing on the SUR forms?" If your attorney handles California surrogacy regularly, the answer is a bored yes. If it produces a pause, that tells you something about how often they do this.
2. "Has the physician declaration been requested from the clinic?" That one depends on a third party, which makes it the most likely thing to be sitting in someone's inbox two weeks before it is needed.

Why a rule change is good news

It is tempting to read any new legal requirement as a new hurdle. This one is the opposite. A dedicated rule with dedicated forms means less improvisation, fewer county-by-county differences, and a court file that visibly demonstrates the protections were followed — the notarized agreement, both independent attorneys, the clinic confirming the timing.

Surrogacy journeys rarely fail because the law was unclear. They get difficult when someone cut a corner on sequence or on representation, and nobody noticed until it mattered. California just made cutting those corners considerably harder to hide.

— Bree

Where this comes from

Rule of Court 5.78 and forms SUR-100 and SUR-100(J) are published by the California Courts. The underlying statute is California Family Code sections 7960–7962. We have cited the rule rather than paraphrasing an article about it, because this is the kind of detail that gets garbled in retelling.

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